I'm very encouraged by your work. At the same time, this topic reminds me of debates in the nutrition world about the correct definition of ultraprocessed foods. Let the scientists work it out, but in the meantime, the rest of us can use our common sense to limit our exposure to these modern hazards (UPF's and invasive tech), replacing them with real food, in person human connection, etc, etc. 🙏
We all appreciate the technical deep dive and links to actual studies; as lay people, it is often difficult to support these arguments with people who aren't engaged with children regularly. There is no question in my mind that harm is being visited on children via many different avenues, and social media is only part of it. The real culprit behind all this is advertising, which has always been a subset of the greed of the 20th-21st century, a subset of the petrodollar and its usurious nature.
I am curious why no one is highlighting the 100% increase in anorexia? I know it’s not the focus of this evaluation but the increase is the same as the anxiety/depression rates.
Thanks for your comment. Eating disorders are often linked to internalizing disorders, and the role of social media and smartphones in contributing to the rise is plausible there as well.
Once again, these studies have extremely low effect sizes, meaning that even if accepted as valid, social media use might be associated with 1% of future depression, which is nothing. The significance itself is of much less importance; in large studies, lots of factors, such as eating vegetables, are associated with teens' depression.
Further, these studies fixate on social media to the exclusion of far more important variables. None control for abuse, parents' drug/alcohol problems (which have skyrocketed over the last decade), household violence, or other issues pivotally related to teens' depression. We know abused teens use social media more (CDC, 2021, 2023), and it is much more likely that abuse is the cause of depression than social media use. We could, for example, conclude that listening to country music causes lung cancer, if we simply omit the crucial factor common to both: smoking. So, beware of these very low effect sizes.
Yes to the above. While I believe that kids and social media are harmful, I wish that Haidt and his team would look more closely at teen depression rates by teens who have abusive parents and parents with drug/alcohol problems, vs teens who don't have these negative factors. To me this is an interesting variable which needs careful study.
Nagata et al. 2025 actually controls for adverse childhood experiences, which include alcohol/substance abuse by parents, neglect, family discord, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and so on. The ABCD dataset is quite thorough in that regard.
Also, Riehm controls for baseline MH, meaning any impacts of these traumas on MH up to T1 would be taken into account.
Please note that Alec and Jakey contribute in their spare time -- in fact Jakey is a high school student! The primary purpose of their post was to point out that, contrary to certain simplistic narratives, there are indeed longitudinal studies where heavy SM use is associated with higher risks of future mental health problems in adolescence. To go beyond that, such as to do a comprehensive review of longitudinal studies, would demand far, far more time and space -- and even more time would be required to do any original research.
Thank You for responding. I didn't mean to say that Alec and Jakey personally investigate the parent factor mentioned by Mike Males, that's why I mentioned Haidt and his team, as he seems to have multiple researchers working with him.
I also have some doubts on Mike Males conclusions because even if say parent drug/alcohol problems have skyrocketed in the last decade, that's not the same thing as parent abuse which as far as I know has not risen. Another factor is that kid parent relationships in the present seem to be much better than in the 1960's to 1980's. For example in the online world where there is no shortage of anger at various groups, I don't see any widespread anger from kids towards their parents. Based on this it seems like technology is a big part of the rise in teen depression in the last 10 years.
Having said that I hesitate to say this but I fear that If policy and advice in general go too far in banning phones and devices without addressing parents mental health, substance abuse, economic pressures, or parenting skills, then it's possible that kids including those who aren't born yet will still have problems, perhaps even undergoing a worsening relationship between kids and their parents similar to several decades ago.
Indeed, broadstroke bans would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and would likely do far more harm than good on balance. Especially if the root causes are not addressed as well.
I hope someone will respond to this, because it's the most common criticism I see, and I'd like to understand it better. I recall Jean Twenge addressing it at one point, but I can't quite locate it (at least not quickly).
For myself, it's very obvious that the less I use the internet in general for leisure (possibly aside from a few specific use cases, and even there I am not sure that the analog version is not superior) the happier and less anxious I am. I hear the same from so many people. But it could be that my sample is skewed towards people with similar cognitive characteristics.
One point that should also be added to this debate is that the science of social marketing, which is a soft way of saying manipulation, is evolving and improving with these products. So each study is, in a very real sense, studying a slightly different phenomenon from the year before, and as the years pass the differences become more pronounced.
Dear Thomas, your essay is very good and I find your hypotheses plausible. The topic of recent MH trends is on our tasks list but we are terribly limited in resources, so it may take some time to address. When we do I'll revisit your post content.
P. S. We are already very busy on analysing educational trends -- a major post might come out before the end of the year, I hope.
Have any of these studies used a much more broadly defined way to measure negative impact of phones on kids instead of just worsening mental health? For example could a study measure things like emotional maturity, manners, attention span, eye contact, quality of relationships, grades, physical health, books read, number of non-screen activities, time spent outside, relationship with parents, independence, intellectual curiosity, musical ability, creativity, penmanship, math skills, critical thinking, etc.? My hypothesis is phones worsen all of these and more.
I'd love to see the research on amount of social media use to gender confusion later on. hmmm. Don't all people with gender confusion have a diagnosis of anxiety and/or depression? No one's gonna fund that study.
Both forward and reverse associations hold based on the UK's Millennium Cohort Study, a large nationally-representative birth cohort of Gen Z youth. In particular, childhood mental health problems (age 7), which include emotional (internalising) and behavioural (externalising) difficulties, predicted increased social media use in early adolescence (age 11). In turn, more social media use had a modest but typically non-significant direct association with later mental health problems (e.g. psychological distress, self-harm, suicidality) in late adolescence (age 17).
However, three key indirect associations between social media use at age 11 and later mental health problems at age 17 were statistically significant. Both girls and boys who used social media at age 11 went to sleep later and had a more negative self-image at age 14, which in turn significantly predicted more mental health problems at age 17. For girls only, there was also more interpersonal distrust at age 14, which carried the effect of social media use onto later mental health problems.
In other words, although the overall direct forward association between social media use and subsequent mental health problems was rather small and non-significant, for those teens (and especially girls) who developed more distrust (and/or slept later and had worse self-image) the association was stronger and significant. This result held even after adjustments with a wide range of confounders as well as controlling for prior mental health problems (i.e. controlling for the reverse association too).
For details see this recent paper:
Tsomokos, D.I., Adolescent social media use and psychiatric outcomes: a longitudinal mediation analysis via interpersonal distrust, sleep, and self-image. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (2025).
Thank you for doing what you are doing and I will try to financially support you to the extent of my modest capabilities. I am a humble researcher in the field of psychology myself and have been thinking about these problems myself. For context I live in Serbia a European country hit by upheaval with a clear generational divide and I volunteer as a mental health professional working with young people, mainly student protesters, in individual and group therapy format. I have some key takeaways from this experience and my past and current research that I wish to share and hope will be of use.
1. Please, oh please, do not dismiss my comments just because they are based on a theory that is relatively unpopular in America at this time, I am talking about Erik Erikson's ego-identity theory and his work in this field, most recently manifested in James E. Cote's book "Youth Development in Identity Societies: Paradoxes of Purpose". His theories on Identity capital can be modified to fit the perceived social capital gained by social use. This is a big ask but I wish you would acquaint yourself with this aspect of developmental psychology and the two instruments best suited for research in this wield the DIDS and the ANIQ. At present I am conducting preliminary research trying to combine this but I am a one man army so its going slow. While there is little to no evidence about identity formation and social media use, especially problematic social media use there is plenty of evidence linking a failure to create the viable, robust ego-identity in adolescence to depression and a sense of confusion in late adolescence and prolonged youth period. If we take that Erikson's original theory (1967) postulates that identity is formed against a “tangible collective future”, the profound lack of the later construct must therefore impact identity formation. Also important, Erikson postulates self-sameness as a necessary precursor of wellbeing. I have some current research in press developing a identity discontinuity scale and it correlates negatively with many factors of wellbeing and positively with psychological distress. I can elaborate on this if needed.
2. At least in my country the population of the young is politically swinging right on a massive scale (measured by the Altemeyer/Zakrison RWA scale and the SDO7 scale), some unpublished research of mine indicated that there are differences in political views between types of social media use where there is a statistically significant increase in right wing orientation in those young individuals (mean age about 21) who claim to create more content, not just passively scroll.
3. At present I am conducing research on young individuals asking for mental health help from a psychologist. I am using the DASS21, PANASX, SWLS and DIDS questionnaires. At present it is stress that is the most prominent factor of distress followed by depression than anxiety as a distant third, fear is the most prominent negative emotion and identity commitment variables are most prominent. I do not yet have the sample size for anything but descriptive statistics. Bare in mind that my country has its own problems right now that might make it difficult to generalize these findings from the trenches.
4. I have asked professor Haidt for permission to translate his morality questionnaire into Serbian, and have been granted one, I was planning to perform this research at one point but given your efforts I will try and push this forward.
5. Apart from the lack of a stabile identity, what I find in practice is a complete lack of ideology of any kind in young people. This lack of ideology makes them vulnerable to the four basic existential fears, as described by Yalom, fear of death, freedom, meaninglessness and solitude. They lack the accumulated wealth of cultural knowledge to synthesize an authentic response to these fears so they go for the prefabricated solutions of grand narratives be they national or religious or both, facilitating the youth swing to the right. If we look at the classical sociological elite theorists from the 20s and 30s, I argue that the societal elite is expected to provide economic certainty and prosperity and ideological support for the population or be replaced. This has been carefully manipulated when chaos was rebranded as opportunity and lack of ideology as freedom of choice. And these things contribute greatly to the epidemic of anxiety I believe.
There is more to be said on these subject to be sure but in a nutshell Erikson's ego-identity and existential fears seem to me to be dominant problems in young individuals manifested by distress and lack of need satisfaction. I have not had time to acquaint myself completely with all of the teams work on this aspect so if I have repeated things already said and investigated I beg forgiveness form the authors.
I have the greatest respect for your work, I will contribute in anyway possible because the crisis is palpable everywhere. Let me quote Dante "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality". I wish you all the best.
P.S. - English is my second language, forgive its butchery.
What a fascinating read, thank you! It helped open my eyes to the importance of longitudinal studies, and not being impressed by cross-sectional data alone.
Have you come across the 2025 review by Vasconcellos et al. titled:
"Electronic Screen Use and Children’s Socioemotional Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies"
Their review looks at both forward and reverse predictability, and thus would be relevant for your work.
They found evidence for both forward predictability and reverse predictability. The associations were small but meaningful in both directions.
For reverse predictability, they saw that the "longitudinal associations between socioemotional problems and future screen use become stronger over time."
My big takeaway is that whether the child has socioemotional problems or not, the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, & video games is likely to be harmful and needs to be addressed.
Thank you for the excellent summary of the Vasconcellos review!
Alec and Jakey were aware of this paper, but it is primarily about screen time while their focus was on social media. Also, they had to keep the post reasonably short, since it is for the general public and since their own time resources are very limited.
I'm very encouraged by your work. At the same time, this topic reminds me of debates in the nutrition world about the correct definition of ultraprocessed foods. Let the scientists work it out, but in the meantime, the rest of us can use our common sense to limit our exposure to these modern hazards (UPF's and invasive tech), replacing them with real food, in person human connection, etc, etc. 🙏
We all appreciate the technical deep dive and links to actual studies; as lay people, it is often difficult to support these arguments with people who aren't engaged with children regularly. There is no question in my mind that harm is being visited on children via many different avenues, and social media is only part of it. The real culprit behind all this is advertising, which has always been a subset of the greed of the 20th-21st century, a subset of the petrodollar and its usurious nature.
I am curious why no one is highlighting the 100% increase in anorexia? I know it’s not the focus of this evaluation but the increase is the same as the anxiety/depression rates.
Thanks for your comment. Eating disorders are often linked to internalizing disorders, and the role of social media and smartphones in contributing to the rise is plausible there as well.
Love the deep dive in to hard science.
Once again, these studies have extremely low effect sizes, meaning that even if accepted as valid, social media use might be associated with 1% of future depression, which is nothing. The significance itself is of much less importance; in large studies, lots of factors, such as eating vegetables, are associated with teens' depression.
Further, these studies fixate on social media to the exclusion of far more important variables. None control for abuse, parents' drug/alcohol problems (which have skyrocketed over the last decade), household violence, or other issues pivotally related to teens' depression. We know abused teens use social media more (CDC, 2021, 2023), and it is much more likely that abuse is the cause of depression than social media use. We could, for example, conclude that listening to country music causes lung cancer, if we simply omit the crucial factor common to both: smoking. So, beware of these very low effect sizes.
Yes to the above. While I believe that kids and social media are harmful, I wish that Haidt and his team would look more closely at teen depression rates by teens who have abusive parents and parents with drug/alcohol problems, vs teens who don't have these negative factors. To me this is an interesting variable which needs careful study.
Hi Steven,
Nagata et al. 2025 actually controls for adverse childhood experiences, which include alcohol/substance abuse by parents, neglect, family discord, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and so on. The ABCD dataset is quite thorough in that regard.
Also, Riehm controls for baseline MH, meaning any impacts of these traumas on MH up to T1 would be taken into account.
Please note that Alec and Jakey contribute in their spare time -- in fact Jakey is a high school student! The primary purpose of their post was to point out that, contrary to certain simplistic narratives, there are indeed longitudinal studies where heavy SM use is associated with higher risks of future mental health problems in adolescence. To go beyond that, such as to do a comprehensive review of longitudinal studies, would demand far, far more time and space -- and even more time would be required to do any original research.
Thank You for responding. I didn't mean to say that Alec and Jakey personally investigate the parent factor mentioned by Mike Males, that's why I mentioned Haidt and his team, as he seems to have multiple researchers working with him.
I also have some doubts on Mike Males conclusions because even if say parent drug/alcohol problems have skyrocketed in the last decade, that's not the same thing as parent abuse which as far as I know has not risen. Another factor is that kid parent relationships in the present seem to be much better than in the 1960's to 1980's. For example in the online world where there is no shortage of anger at various groups, I don't see any widespread anger from kids towards their parents. Based on this it seems like technology is a big part of the rise in teen depression in the last 10 years.
Having said that I hesitate to say this but I fear that If policy and advice in general go too far in banning phones and devices without addressing parents mental health, substance abuse, economic pressures, or parenting skills, then it's possible that kids including those who aren't born yet will still have problems, perhaps even undergoing a worsening relationship between kids and their parents similar to several decades ago.
Indeed, broadstroke bans would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and would likely do far more harm than good on balance. Especially if the root causes are not addressed as well.
Well said as usual, Mike! Shout it from the rooftops!
I hope someone will respond to this, because it's the most common criticism I see, and I'd like to understand it better. I recall Jean Twenge addressing it at one point, but I can't quite locate it (at least not quickly).
For myself, it's very obvious that the less I use the internet in general for leisure (possibly aside from a few specific use cases, and even there I am not sure that the analog version is not superior) the happier and less anxious I am. I hear the same from so many people. But it could be that my sample is skewed towards people with similar cognitive characteristics.
Please see my reply to Steven above, especially my note on Nagata.
As to Jean Twenge, https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/is-child-abuse-the-real-reason-for and https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/parent-drug-overdoses-the-true-cause is relevant.
One point that should also be added to this debate is that the science of social marketing, which is a soft way of saying manipulation, is evolving and improving with these products. So each study is, in a very real sense, studying a slightly different phenomenon from the year before, and as the years pass the differences become more pronounced.
Thanks for the thorough and persuasive review of these studies.
An odd thing is happening, though. In the past few years, teen mental health has been improving. I have some thoughts on why here: https://open.substack.com/pub/healthscaping/p/shocker-teen-mental-health-is-now
Dear Thomas, your essay is very good and I find your hypotheses plausible. The topic of recent MH trends is on our tasks list but we are terribly limited in resources, so it may take some time to address. When we do I'll revisit your post content.
P. S. We are already very busy on analysing educational trends -- a major post might come out before the end of the year, I hope.
Have any of these studies used a much more broadly defined way to measure negative impact of phones on kids instead of just worsening mental health? For example could a study measure things like emotional maturity, manners, attention span, eye contact, quality of relationships, grades, physical health, books read, number of non-screen activities, time spent outside, relationship with parents, independence, intellectual curiosity, musical ability, creativity, penmanship, math skills, critical thinking, etc.? My hypothesis is phones worsen all of these and more.
I'd love to see the research on amount of social media use to gender confusion later on. hmmm. Don't all people with gender confusion have a diagnosis of anxiety and/or depression? No one's gonna fund that study.
Both forward and reverse associations hold based on the UK's Millennium Cohort Study, a large nationally-representative birth cohort of Gen Z youth. In particular, childhood mental health problems (age 7), which include emotional (internalising) and behavioural (externalising) difficulties, predicted increased social media use in early adolescence (age 11). In turn, more social media use had a modest but typically non-significant direct association with later mental health problems (e.g. psychological distress, self-harm, suicidality) in late adolescence (age 17).
However, three key indirect associations between social media use at age 11 and later mental health problems at age 17 were statistically significant. Both girls and boys who used social media at age 11 went to sleep later and had a more negative self-image at age 14, which in turn significantly predicted more mental health problems at age 17. For girls only, there was also more interpersonal distrust at age 14, which carried the effect of social media use onto later mental health problems.
In other words, although the overall direct forward association between social media use and subsequent mental health problems was rather small and non-significant, for those teens (and especially girls) who developed more distrust (and/or slept later and had worse self-image) the association was stronger and significant. This result held even after adjustments with a wide range of confounders as well as controlling for prior mental health problems (i.e. controlling for the reverse association too).
For details see this recent paper:
Tsomokos, D.I., Adolescent social media use and psychiatric outcomes: a longitudinal mediation analysis via interpersonal distrust, sleep, and self-image. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-025-02999-w
Excellent, thanks for highlighting this, and congratulations on the paper. We’ve added it to our (continually growing) list of studies.
Thank you for doing what you are doing and I will try to financially support you to the extent of my modest capabilities. I am a humble researcher in the field of psychology myself and have been thinking about these problems myself. For context I live in Serbia a European country hit by upheaval with a clear generational divide and I volunteer as a mental health professional working with young people, mainly student protesters, in individual and group therapy format. I have some key takeaways from this experience and my past and current research that I wish to share and hope will be of use.
1. Please, oh please, do not dismiss my comments just because they are based on a theory that is relatively unpopular in America at this time, I am talking about Erik Erikson's ego-identity theory and his work in this field, most recently manifested in James E. Cote's book "Youth Development in Identity Societies: Paradoxes of Purpose". His theories on Identity capital can be modified to fit the perceived social capital gained by social use. This is a big ask but I wish you would acquaint yourself with this aspect of developmental psychology and the two instruments best suited for research in this wield the DIDS and the ANIQ. At present I am conducting preliminary research trying to combine this but I am a one man army so its going slow. While there is little to no evidence about identity formation and social media use, especially problematic social media use there is plenty of evidence linking a failure to create the viable, robust ego-identity in adolescence to depression and a sense of confusion in late adolescence and prolonged youth period. If we take that Erikson's original theory (1967) postulates that identity is formed against a “tangible collective future”, the profound lack of the later construct must therefore impact identity formation. Also important, Erikson postulates self-sameness as a necessary precursor of wellbeing. I have some current research in press developing a identity discontinuity scale and it correlates negatively with many factors of wellbeing and positively with psychological distress. I can elaborate on this if needed.
2. At least in my country the population of the young is politically swinging right on a massive scale (measured by the Altemeyer/Zakrison RWA scale and the SDO7 scale), some unpublished research of mine indicated that there are differences in political views between types of social media use where there is a statistically significant increase in right wing orientation in those young individuals (mean age about 21) who claim to create more content, not just passively scroll.
3. At present I am conducing research on young individuals asking for mental health help from a psychologist. I am using the DASS21, PANASX, SWLS and DIDS questionnaires. At present it is stress that is the most prominent factor of distress followed by depression than anxiety as a distant third, fear is the most prominent negative emotion and identity commitment variables are most prominent. I do not yet have the sample size for anything but descriptive statistics. Bare in mind that my country has its own problems right now that might make it difficult to generalize these findings from the trenches.
4. I have asked professor Haidt for permission to translate his morality questionnaire into Serbian, and have been granted one, I was planning to perform this research at one point but given your efforts I will try and push this forward.
5. Apart from the lack of a stabile identity, what I find in practice is a complete lack of ideology of any kind in young people. This lack of ideology makes them vulnerable to the four basic existential fears, as described by Yalom, fear of death, freedom, meaninglessness and solitude. They lack the accumulated wealth of cultural knowledge to synthesize an authentic response to these fears so they go for the prefabricated solutions of grand narratives be they national or religious or both, facilitating the youth swing to the right. If we look at the classical sociological elite theorists from the 20s and 30s, I argue that the societal elite is expected to provide economic certainty and prosperity and ideological support for the population or be replaced. This has been carefully manipulated when chaos was rebranded as opportunity and lack of ideology as freedom of choice. And these things contribute greatly to the epidemic of anxiety I believe.
There is more to be said on these subject to be sure but in a nutshell Erikson's ego-identity and existential fears seem to me to be dominant problems in young individuals manifested by distress and lack of need satisfaction. I have not had time to acquaint myself completely with all of the teams work on this aspect so if I have repeated things already said and investigated I beg forgiveness form the authors.
I have the greatest respect for your work, I will contribute in anyway possible because the crisis is palpable everywhere. Let me quote Dante "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality". I wish you all the best.
P.S. - English is my second language, forgive its butchery.
Hello sirs,
What a fascinating read, thank you! It helped open my eyes to the importance of longitudinal studies, and not being impressed by cross-sectional data alone.
Have you come across the 2025 review by Vasconcellos et al. titled:
"Electronic Screen Use and Children’s Socioemotional Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies"
Their review looks at both forward and reverse predictability, and thus would be relevant for your work.
They found evidence for both forward predictability and reverse predictability. The associations were small but meaningful in both directions.
For reverse predictability, they saw that the "longitudinal associations between socioemotional problems and future screen use become stronger over time."
My big takeaway is that whether the child has socioemotional problems or not, the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, & video games is likely to be harmful and needs to be addressed.
Hi Michael,
Thank you for the excellent summary of the Vasconcellos review!
Alec and Jakey were aware of this paper, but it is primarily about screen time while their focus was on social media. Also, they had to keep the post reasonably short, since it is for the general public and since their own time resources are very limited.
Study Internet Pornography use amongst straight teen boys next please.