Stop panicking over teens and social media

Summary
Modern life is digital. Adults need to help young people navigate the costs and benefits, not launch bans and hope for the best.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. At the very least, these debates show that the psychological impact of social media is hardly clear-cut.
Any generalization about social media is problematic because both the apps and the users vary enormously. How social media affects a young person depends on a range of factors, including their personality, their friends, their mood, their real-world experiences and the technology itself, among other things.
Studies show that social media use can indeed cause distress and harm in some young people, but it can also have no impact or even improve well-being in others.
For example, one 2021 study of 387 Dutch adolescents in the journal Communication Research found that 45% reported no change in well-being immediately after using social media, 28% noted a decline and 26% expressed a rise. Some young users observed that social media makes them feel anxious or left out, or that they see inappropriate and distressing content. But participants also said social media helps them feel more connected with their friends and themselves, that it offers outlets for creativity and an antidote to loneliness.
A review of 36 studies examining how young people engage with friends online, published in the journal Adolescent Research Review in 2017, found that all the core qualities of face-to-face friendships, such as validating feelings, offering emotional support and having fun, play out virtually, too. “Rather than reducing intimacy in friendships," the authors wrote, “technology-mediated communication may provide the same benefits to teens as interactions that occur face-to-face."
In a 2024 study in the journal Social Media + Society, teenagers in focus groups explained that they look to social media for connection, entertainment, inspiration and information. The effect of these experiences proved mixed. Some said they felt more connected with friends, others felt lonelier (for example if they saw their friends were hanging out without them). Some said they sometimes had positive and negative feelings at the same time. As one 17-year-old girl explained: “When I see pictures from people who are traveling the world, I guess I feel both jealous and inspired."
These motley effects mean that sledgehammer solutions, such as total bans, won’t reliably improve young people’s mental health. Even if a government was successful in preventing teens from having access to social media—a big “if," since no one has figured out how to actually do this—it would likely improve some young people’s lives while making others worse.
This doesn’t mean that young people should be unleashed, Lord of the Flies-style, into a digital wilderness. Tech companies should be required to make their platforms safer, such as by restricting access to explicit or violent content. Parents should have and use tools that limit the amount of time young people spend online and what they see when they’re there.
But beyond regulatory guardrails and technical tools, rules for social media use, and at what age they are gradually eased, should be left to families and schools.
Buried beneath the debate over how to protect adolescents from the harms of the internet is an awkward but significant reality: Being an adult today involves being online. There is very little any of us do that is not mediated in some way by our computer or phone, and that includes our social relationships. Since the main function of parenting adolescents is to help them develop into independent adults, this means helping them to navigate this digitally mediated life.
It is naive to think we can allow adolescents to explore the adult-approved bits of the internet and prevent them from using it to interact with each other. Young people are experts in getting around the rules. When China imposed strict controls on online gaming in 2019, young people signed in with the names of older relatives or friends, used photos of other people to trick facial-recognition software and bought accounts through the black market, which introduced the risk of scams.
A social media ban would similarly bring unintended consequences and new problems. Young people in search of online socializing could find or create underregulated platforms and use secret phones their parents don’t know about. If something goes wrong, they may feel more nervous about asking for help.
Social media does pose real challenges for some adolescents, and this is compounded by common features of these apps, such as filters that can change a young person’s appearance in a photo or the capacity for endless scrolling. But banning this technology for everyone under 16 isn’t the solution, not least because these sites are so well embedded in popular culture.
Instead, tech companies should mitigate the obvious harms, and trusted grown-ups should be there to help young people manage the rest of it, just like with every other risk and challenge on the path to maturity.
Lucy Foulkes is a research psychologist at the University of Oxford. She is the author of “Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness" and “Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us."