Twenge delivers a convincing, data-driven rebuttal of Odger’s critique of the smart phone explanation of mental health deterioration. Odgers apparently argues from a woke belief set, unburdened by bothersome facts.
All of these people want to conveniently ignore what's going on in public education or just pretend it only just started.
There is no one thing no "that's it" to point at for what's wrong with young people today. Like most things it's a combination of many things to varying degrees. Young people have numerous influences and depending on how much weight each carries will determine how that person turns out. There's no way the advent of the mobile computing device didn't have some level of impact on Millennials and GenZ but how much and to what direction: better or worse? I remember fears of the calculator making people stupid when it come st9o math b/c they no longer had to figure it out for themselves each time.
What irks me is these efforts to entirely avoid looking at that where kids of school age spend the majority of their time; school and most of them in public or government funded/run schools. Thanks to remove learning caused by covid parents were exposed to what was really being said/taught i their kids and it shocked them b/c until then the public education system did a good job of hiding this from parents. The fact they hide things should tell you the education system is a problem, specifically those running it. If you think that what was discovered was new you have your head in the sand.
The public education system has been co-opted/captured by person who want a collectivist form of governance; that would be the Marxists, Communists and Socialist's and the only effective way to do that is to condition the younger generation, indoctrinate them and the nest place to do that is in the schools. Ex KGB agent who got asylum in America warned us that this was a plan created by those in his country and sure enough it's played out exactly as he said it would but because it's too close to sounding like the plot of a movie many just can't accept it so they look elsewhere for answers.
It is the combination of public education indoctrination followed by more of it in the universities combined with the advent of mobile computing and social media that have together created what we see today in the youth. Additionally we older generations have not forced these younger generations to grow up as they grow old so we have 2 generations of adult aged juveniles with access to power. It is like a billionaire leaving everything to his 16 year old kid with no strings or requirements. What is the likely hood that kid will implode vs continue his father's success?
The author of the review is the co-director of a CIFAR funded research program titled Child & Brain Development from which they receive research support. CIFAR is focused on complex problems largely centered on technology and health. They receive funding from donors and corporations. The latest major donor was Google.org.
When an academic publishes a hit piece - that with the information set I have available right off the top of my head - I can rebut - with no further research needed - my immediate assumption is that the academic in question is simply acting in bad faith and doing so for a purpose. I have no reason to believe that Ms. Odgers is not an intelligent intellectually competent person - so what other explanation than "bad faith" - can explain her promotion in the public square of such sophomoric and obviously flawed arguments? Or, is such lack of intellectual rigor and the inability to think critically simply characteristic of the state of Academia today? Given some of the nonsense articles Nature has published over the last few years - perhaps such intellectual incompetence is simply the - "new normal?"
Odgers states that part of the cause of teen mental illness is the impact of exposure to racism, sexism, guns and violence. But racism, sexism, violence and guns have existed for a long time, and have arguably decreased in some ways....so why would they just now become a cause of mental illness? And if this is an issue of sudden increased exposure, I would ask what are the means of this increased exposure? Through phones, internet and social media perhaps??
Anyone who refuses to see the direct link to the advent of social media and particularly cell phones as their courier, to kids messed up state, is just being willfully blind, or a schill for those things.
When we were growing up, our parents got us out of their hair by making us “go outside and play”, and we did, usually until it was dark! And it was always, always an adventure and tons of fun with all your friends and neighborhood kids.
You barely EVER even see kids playing outside anymore. So tragic.
A minor point, but... why is causation by 'economic deprivation' being treated as the null hypothesis? Dr. Twenge is being held to (and meeting) a far higher standard of evidence here than Dr. Odgers.
It’s funny and ironic that your critic complains about the reliance on mono-causality….then offers an alternate theory/explanation that also implies monocausality.
Pot: “Kettle, you’re black”.
But it was testable, and this is a nice fact-based rebuttal.
To those who contest the effect of smartphones on kids´mental health by saying “we don’t have enough data”, I’d like to propose an alternative line of reasoning:
- Children spend 5-10 hours per day on their phones doing stuff of little to no social and educational value, with harmful effects on their mental health.
- Those 5-10 hours are therefore not available for activities with high social and educational value which would benefit their mental health (Jonathan Haidt’s opportunity costs).
- Ergo smartphones are the main problem (the other being overprotective parenting with its subsequent loss of unsupervised outdoor play).
This could be dismissed as unscientific, but the logic can't be faulted.
As Einstein reportedly said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”.
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
Jon, I would like to take issue with your remark that “That (attribution of teen depression to poverty … and racial and sexual discrimination) is a reasonable … hypothesis. Odgers’ list of potential threats and stressors is plausible, at least in the United States.” I take issue because, as is plain to anyone who has inhabited the US for 65 years, as I have (as well as to anyone who gives an unbiased reading to the poverty data), there is far less of all those things than has been the case in the past. So if they weren’t causing elevated levels of teen depression then, how can they be now?
I think what is far more plausible is that Odger’s assertions are simply the standard claims endlessly repeated by some.
What IS different now is the presence of social media. As well as the aforementioned constantly-repeated assertions of omnipresent racism, sexism, oppression, and injustice. If I were a teenager being constantly bombarded by that, I might be depressed too.
I am shocked at the angry pushback I see on X and surprised at myself for being shocked! I always think that when it comes to our kids, people will work together and be supportive to protect them. This isn't just intellectual disagreement, but spiritual warfare. When the light shines on minions they squeal.
"It’s now nearly universally accepted that teens are in the midst of a mental health crisis."
I believe this sentence is largetrue, based in part on data on Canadian youths analyzed by our research group.
However, I would regret it if anyone reading Professor Twenge's post believed that we have a scientifically adequate system for simply _measuring_ the population mental health of adolescents or any other portion of the population. We do not, which is one reason why there is so much uncertainty about the causes of these problems.
why is it always the academics who reject this hypothesis? it’s almost like they can’t accept the reality? why? I know a specific professor from UVA whom has also written about the dangers of social media (who posts on FB 4-5 times a day), who rages at Haidts work. “if Jonathon really cared about teen girls, he should just talk to them” etc…
I think it’s because the damage smartphones and social media aren’t just related to teens, it’s effecting all of us. these professors are addicted to their phones as well and they can’t stand anyone pointing it out...
Modern adolescents are raised in an insane culture of runaway capitalism. Smart phones and social media designed to maximise ad revenue and dopamine are one manifestation of this. Adolescents also see the adults around them utterly captured and subjugated by work and debt. They see the pyramid scheme structure of neoliberal inequality. They see a rapidly dying biosphere. They have practically no exposure to nature or knowledge to engage with it, since the adults no longer posses this knowledge. This one is huge: we evolved in nature and are now severed from it and responsible for its destruction.
There is no coherent or meaningful life narrative. No shared rituals or ceremony or spiritual guidance. Adolescents are taught that they and everyone around them are individualistic economic contestants. Then post modernism tells them to find their own path.
The social media critique is valuable and true. But it is a symptom of the problem. Our culture is insane because the current paradigm is insane. Capitalist realism is insane. We need a new paradigm.
Twenge delivers a convincing, data-driven rebuttal of Odger’s critique of the smart phone explanation of mental health deterioration. Odgers apparently argues from a woke belief set, unburdened by bothersome facts.
All of these people want to conveniently ignore what's going on in public education or just pretend it only just started.
There is no one thing no "that's it" to point at for what's wrong with young people today. Like most things it's a combination of many things to varying degrees. Young people have numerous influences and depending on how much weight each carries will determine how that person turns out. There's no way the advent of the mobile computing device didn't have some level of impact on Millennials and GenZ but how much and to what direction: better or worse? I remember fears of the calculator making people stupid when it come st9o math b/c they no longer had to figure it out for themselves each time.
What irks me is these efforts to entirely avoid looking at that where kids of school age spend the majority of their time; school and most of them in public or government funded/run schools. Thanks to remove learning caused by covid parents were exposed to what was really being said/taught i their kids and it shocked them b/c until then the public education system did a good job of hiding this from parents. The fact they hide things should tell you the education system is a problem, specifically those running it. If you think that what was discovered was new you have your head in the sand.
The public education system has been co-opted/captured by person who want a collectivist form of governance; that would be the Marxists, Communists and Socialist's and the only effective way to do that is to condition the younger generation, indoctrinate them and the nest place to do that is in the schools. Ex KGB agent who got asylum in America warned us that this was a plan created by those in his country and sure enough it's played out exactly as he said it would but because it's too close to sounding like the plot of a movie many just can't accept it so they look elsewhere for answers.
It is the combination of public education indoctrination followed by more of it in the universities combined with the advent of mobile computing and social media that have together created what we see today in the youth. Additionally we older generations have not forced these younger generations to grow up as they grow old so we have 2 generations of adult aged juveniles with access to power. It is like a billionaire leaving everything to his 16 year old kid with no strings or requirements. What is the likely hood that kid will implode vs continue his father's success?
The author of the review is the co-director of a CIFAR funded research program titled Child & Brain Development from which they receive research support. CIFAR is focused on complex problems largely centered on technology and health. They receive funding from donors and corporations. The latest major donor was Google.org.
https://cifar.ca/cifarnews/2024/03/18/cifar-receives-google-org-grant-to-bolster-key-research-in-sustainability-and-responsible-ai/
When an academic publishes a hit piece - that with the information set I have available right off the top of my head - I can rebut - with no further research needed - my immediate assumption is that the academic in question is simply acting in bad faith and doing so for a purpose. I have no reason to believe that Ms. Odgers is not an intelligent intellectually competent person - so what other explanation than "bad faith" - can explain her promotion in the public square of such sophomoric and obviously flawed arguments? Or, is such lack of intellectual rigor and the inability to think critically simply characteristic of the state of Academia today? Given some of the nonsense articles Nature has published over the last few years - perhaps such intellectual incompetence is simply the - "new normal?"
Odgers states that part of the cause of teen mental illness is the impact of exposure to racism, sexism, guns and violence. But racism, sexism, violence and guns have existed for a long time, and have arguably decreased in some ways....so why would they just now become a cause of mental illness? And if this is an issue of sudden increased exposure, I would ask what are the means of this increased exposure? Through phones, internet and social media perhaps??
Anyone who refuses to see the direct link to the advent of social media and particularly cell phones as their courier, to kids messed up state, is just being willfully blind, or a schill for those things.
When we were growing up, our parents got us out of their hair by making us “go outside and play”, and we did, usually until it was dark! And it was always, always an adventure and tons of fun with all your friends and neighborhood kids.
You barely EVER even see kids playing outside anymore. So tragic.
Disappointing that a university professor would advance such a fairly easily disprovable hypothesis. What does that tell us about academia…
A minor point, but... why is causation by 'economic deprivation' being treated as the null hypothesis? Dr. Twenge is being held to (and meeting) a far higher standard of evidence here than Dr. Odgers.
It’s funny and ironic that your critic complains about the reliance on mono-causality….then offers an alternate theory/explanation that also implies monocausality.
Pot: “Kettle, you’re black”.
But it was testable, and this is a nice fact-based rebuttal.
To those who contest the effect of smartphones on kids´mental health by saying “we don’t have enough data”, I’d like to propose an alternative line of reasoning:
- Children spend 5-10 hours per day on their phones doing stuff of little to no social and educational value, with harmful effects on their mental health.
- Those 5-10 hours are therefore not available for activities with high social and educational value which would benefit their mental health (Jonathan Haidt’s opportunity costs).
- Ergo smartphones are the main problem (the other being overprotective parenting with its subsequent loss of unsupervised outdoor play).
This could be dismissed as unscientific, but the logic can't be faulted.
As Einstein reportedly said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”.
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
(Mic drop)
Jon, I would like to take issue with your remark that “That (attribution of teen depression to poverty … and racial and sexual discrimination) is a reasonable … hypothesis. Odgers’ list of potential threats and stressors is plausible, at least in the United States.” I take issue because, as is plain to anyone who has inhabited the US for 65 years, as I have (as well as to anyone who gives an unbiased reading to the poverty data), there is far less of all those things than has been the case in the past. So if they weren’t causing elevated levels of teen depression then, how can they be now?
I think what is far more plausible is that Odger’s assertions are simply the standard claims endlessly repeated by some.
What IS different now is the presence of social media. As well as the aforementioned constantly-repeated assertions of omnipresent racism, sexism, oppression, and injustice. If I were a teenager being constantly bombarded by that, I might be depressed too.
I am shocked at the angry pushback I see on X and surprised at myself for being shocked! I always think that when it comes to our kids, people will work together and be supportive to protect them. This isn't just intellectual disagreement, but spiritual warfare. When the light shines on minions they squeal.
"It’s now nearly universally accepted that teens are in the midst of a mental health crisis."
I believe this sentence is largetrue, based in part on data on Canadian youths analyzed by our research group.
However, I would regret it if anyone reading Professor Twenge's post believed that we have a scientifically adequate system for simply _measuring_ the population mental health of adolescents or any other portion of the population. We do not, which is one reason why there is so much uncertainty about the causes of these problems.
why is it always the academics who reject this hypothesis? it’s almost like they can’t accept the reality? why? I know a specific professor from UVA whom has also written about the dangers of social media (who posts on FB 4-5 times a day), who rages at Haidts work. “if Jonathon really cared about teen girls, he should just talk to them” etc…
I think it’s because the damage smartphones and social media aren’t just related to teens, it’s effecting all of us. these professors are addicted to their phones as well and they can’t stand anyone pointing it out...
Modern adolescents are raised in an insane culture of runaway capitalism. Smart phones and social media designed to maximise ad revenue and dopamine are one manifestation of this. Adolescents also see the adults around them utterly captured and subjugated by work and debt. They see the pyramid scheme structure of neoliberal inequality. They see a rapidly dying biosphere. They have practically no exposure to nature or knowledge to engage with it, since the adults no longer posses this knowledge. This one is huge: we evolved in nature and are now severed from it and responsible for its destruction.
There is no coherent or meaningful life narrative. No shared rituals or ceremony or spiritual guidance. Adolescents are taught that they and everyone around them are individualistic economic contestants. Then post modernism tells them to find their own path.
The social media critique is valuable and true. But it is a symptom of the problem. Our culture is insane because the current paradigm is insane. Capitalist realism is insane. We need a new paradigm.