Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos What is Social Media Doing to Kids? with Dr. Jean Twenge About this episode Over the past decade, rates of depression and loneliness have surged among young people. Many researchers point to one major change: the rise of smartphones and social media. But what does the data actually show?
Psychologist Jean Twenge has spent years studying how technology shapes adolescent happiness. Dr. Laurie sits down with her to unpack new findings from the 2026 World Happiness Report https://www.worldhappiness.report/ on how social media use affects teen wellbeing around the world.
What happens when kids spend hours a day on these platforms? Is any amount of social media actually beneficial? And what can we all do to build healthier relationships with our phones, regardless of age?
Resources mentioned in this episode:
“What is the International Day of Happiness? https://www.un.org/en/observances/happiness-day”
“World Happiness Report 2026 https://www.worldhappiness.report/”
iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood https://books.apple.com/us/book/igen/id1180611517
“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/”
“National Trends in the Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in Adolescents and Young Adults https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27940701/”
“Pew Research Center Mobile Fact Sheet https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/”
“Increases in Depression, Self‐Harm, and Suicide Among U. S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use: Possible Mechanisms https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9176070/”
“The Effects of Social Media Restriction: Meta-Analytic Evidence from Randomized controlled Trials https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000714”
“Am I Happier Without You? Social Media Detox and Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11939267/”
PISA 2022 Database https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/pisa-2022-database.html
10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children's Lives https://books.apple.com/us/book/10-rules-for-raising-kids-in-a-high-tech-world/id6743085792
“Over 20,000 Educators Share Insights on School Cell Phone Policies https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/angela-duckworth-over-20000-educators-share-insights-school-cell-phone-policies”
“Managing Student Digital Distraction in the College Classroom: a Self-Determination Theory Perspective https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-023-09780-y”
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
0:12 Laurie Santos? Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Happy International Day of Happiness. The International Day of Happiness is a holiday established by the United Nations as a global day of recognition about the fundamental importance of human happiness. And on this day each year, the United Nations and its partners release the World Happiness Report, their annual snapshot of how happy people are around the globe. The report is also famous for ranking the happiest countries in the world. And this year, the happiest country is Finland for the ninth year in a row. So congratulations to Finland and all its lucky inhabitants. For a social science nerd like me, the World Happiness Report is an absolute treat. It brings leading researchers around the world together to dig into the political,
0:56 Laurie Santos? social, and economic forces that shape our well-being. Each new edition of the World Happiness Report centers around a different theme, and this year's theme feels especially relevant.
1:06 Speaker 01 If we're going to think about psychological well-being and happiness in the modern age, we have to look in depth at technology.
1:14 Laurie Santos? This is Dr. Jean Twenge, one of the researchers behind this year's World Happiness Report. Jean is an internationally celebrated psychologist at San Diego State University. Her chapter looks at how young people around the world use and respond to social media. Jean is something of a rock star when it comes to understanding teens and technology. In fact, she was one of the first people to sound the alarm on how smartphones might be damaging adolescent mental health.
1:40 Speaker 01 The article in The Atlantic was an excerpt of my book, IGen, which came out in August 2017. It was headlined, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
1:51 Laurie Santos? As you can imagine, people had some very strong reactions to this title.
1:55 Speaker 01 I always like to point out, number one, it's a question, and number two, I didn't write it, because headlines are written by editors, not by the authors, and they're supposed to be clickbait, and it did its job.
2:05 Laurie Santos? But the article itself was grounded in some pretty revolutionary data.
2:08 Speaker 01 It really came from what I was seeing in these big national surveys of teens. All of a sudden, around 2012, more and more teens started to say that they felt lonely. That they felt left out, that they felt like they couldn't do anything right, that their lives weren't useful, that they didn't enjoy life. And those last three are classic symptoms of depression.
2:30 Speaker 02 One of the things I find so harrowing about that article, reading it now, is that you had this sentence that young people might be, quote, "on the brink of a mental health crisis." What has happened since that, that time?
2:42 Speaker 01 I mean, if you follow that metaphor through, if they're on the brink of a cliff, they fell off the cliff.
2:49 Laurie Santos? But if our young people have fallen off the cliff, is there any way for them to climb back on top? Well, stay tuned, because in this episode, Jean and I will explore new data from around the world on how young people today are using social media, and what the latest research shows about how all of us can build healthier relationships with these platforms. The Happiness Lab will return right after some quick messages from our sponsors.
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6:06 Laurie Santos? I was so excited to hear that psychologist Jean Twenge was part of the 2026 World Happiness Report. Jean's been a research hero of mine for a while, in large part because she was one of the very first researchers to call out the negative effects of smartphones on teen happiness.
6:22 Speaker 01 And then other folks started to notice this, too. There was an article in Pediatrics about clinical-level depression suddenly going up around 2012, that emergency room admissions for self-harm were going up, that suicide rate was going up. So... There was a lot of stuff going on with that turning point around 2012.
6:42 Speaker 02 And so what did you think was going on at first?
6:44 Speaker 01 I had no clue. I mean, really, it was a mystery. I just remember thinking like, what's going wrong in the lives of teens at that point? And, you know, when you work with big data sets that go over time, when you have one year of data, you always have to pause and go, okay, this could be a blip. It might go back to normal the next year, but it didn't. So then I started thinking more broadly, well, could it be the economy? That's always kind of the first place that you have to go. It was clearly not the economy. Those of us who lived through the Great Recession know how bad that got, but it was finally, finally over by 2012. And things were getting better in the US economy was a mystery. But at the same time that I started to notice these trends, I'd been working on a few other projects with these surveys
7:27 Speaker 01 and noticed that around that same turning point in 2012, teens also started to sleep less. And maybe even more crucially, teens and young adults are spending less time hanging out with their friends, going to parties, just getting together with friends informally and socializing. All of it was going down. And I thought about all of those things. You know, we have depression going up. We have less time with friends in person, less time sleeping. What might possibly explain that? And then I saw a few research had data on ownership of smartphones. And it turns out that the ownership of smartphones among Americans passed 50% around the end of 2012. And that started to coalesce into a theory
8:11 Speaker 01 that it was the rise of smartphones, the rise of social media that might explain these trends.
8:19 Speaker 02 Did we know about the mechanisms, how technology might be affecting kids' mental health?
8:23 Speaker 01 I mean, I had that theory about displacing sleep and displacing in-person social interaction with friends. So that seemed like one very clear mechanism. But we didn't know as much, I think, at the time about some of the other mechanisms. But even back then, people were certainly talking about, hey, there's this competition for likes and followers. There's the body image problems cropping up on Instagram.
8:53 Speaker 01 That people are behaving compulsively when it comes to their phones and social media. We didn't know all the ins and outs of that, but teens knew. That's what I also think is really interesting is when I first started to give talks on this in 2017, 2018, I was really afraid that the teens in my audience would be like, you're old. You don't know anything. This stuff is fine. We love it. And that's not even close to what happened.
9:17 Speaker 02 It's so interesting in part because those were the early days of some of these technologies. You know, that was like old school Instagram. That wasn't like reels and all the stuff that sucks them and even more.
9:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
9:28 Speaker 02 So give the listeners a sense of just how bad the statistics are these days.
9:31 Speaker 01 Clinical level depression among teens doubled between 2011 and 2019. Before the pandemic was on the scene, that's how big the problem already was. But it's pretty common to see, especially for depression and anxiety, heavy users of social media are usually somewhere between 50% and 200% more likely to that some kind of criteria for clinically significant depression or high depression.
9:57 Speaker 02 And so now that you've been studying this connection for so long, what are some of the new things that we've learned?
10:02 Speaker 01 We just have a lot more data from a lot more sources now. When I wrote iGen, there were really, as far as I knew, only three experimental studies on social media reduction or abstinence and then looking at outcomes. Just in the last year, we've had several meta-analyses come out because there's now so many social media reduction experiments.
10:23 Speaker 02 So these meta-analyses are big studies of studies where not only do we have more experimental studies, you put all the experimental studies together statistically and ask what's going on.
10:31 Speaker 01 Exactly. So the, the two most recent ones that came out in 2025 both show a significant reduction in depression and then a significant increase in psychological well-being. So happiness, life satisfaction, those types of measures when people give up or cut back on social media, especially if they do that for three weeks or more. What's interesting though, is you can't exactly really ethically do kind of the ideal experiment in this area, which would be to randomly assign a bunch of 12-year-olds to spend eight hours a day on social media. Not really ethical. And even doing that with 22-year-olds would probably not be ethical.
11:11 Speaker 01 So that's why most of the studies have focused on kind of the opposite premise of giving up or reducing social media. By definition, what those studies are doing is taking people from the average use of social media to light. And this, I think, is an opportunity for future research because that's not where the action is in the correlational data. Not even close. It's the heavy users where you really see high rates of depression and unhappiness. So I'm hoping there'll be a study that will take the heavy users and try to get them to cut back. I mean, that might be a little bit of a challenge, but I would expect you'd see even bigger effect sizes there.
11:50 Speaker 02 Another thing I know you've talked a lot about is this idea that we need better data when it comes to cross-cultural social media use. And that's where this new World Happiness Report fits in. And so before you started the World Happiness Report, what were some of the open questions that you wanted to look at with this new dataset?
12:06 Speaker 01 So this is the PISA dataset. PISA stands for the Program for International Student Assessment. Its primary purpose is to look at academic performance in math, reading, and science. And it's of teenagers, so it looks at 15- and 16-year-olds in countries around the world, somewhere between 30 and 40, depending on what measures you're using. And we know from international datasets, including PISA, that there's been an increase over the years in the number of adolescents who say that they're lonely and the number of adolescents who say that they have psychological difficulties like anxiety. But what hasn't been as present is those international datasets asking about hours
12:51 Speaker 01 per day spent on social media and then also having some other measure of mental health or psychological well-being. And so the 2022 administration of PISA does that.
13:06 Speaker 02 So you had the PISA dataset from 2022. What did you find?
13:09 Speaker 01 So for girls around the world, there's a significant link between spending a lot of time on social media and having lower life satisfaction. That was pretty universal across the different regions. It was strongest in English-speaking countries and Western Europe. In Western Europe, for girls, heavy users were 63% more likely to report low life satisfaction than light users. In Asia, they were 46% more likely. Overall, the average across the world, 49% more likely.
13:42 Laurie Santos? So so far, the PISA data lines up with the idea that very heavy social media use isn't great for teen girls' well-being. In the report, heavy use meant spending about five hours or more a day on social media. But when Jean looked beyond girls, the story started to get a little more complicated.
13:59 Speaker 01 For boys, it was a little bit more of a mixed picture. You do see a link, especially again in the UK and Western Europe, that spending more time on social media is linked to lower life satisfaction. But that wasn't universal. In some regions, we don't see much of an effect at all. For girls, it seems to have a bigger impact on their happiness, their life satisfaction, their body image, everything compared to boys.
14:23 Laurie Santos? But the strangest results came from the boys, who were the heaviest users of social media. Think seven-plus hours a day on these platforms.
14:31 Speaker 01 There were some surprises in here. Especially in the data for boys, the heaviest users of social media also were a little bit more likely to say that they had the highest life satisfaction. So choosing a 10 on the 0 to 10 scale, that was a mystery that I'm still trying to figure out. Danny Blanchflower, who's an economist at Dartmouth who's worked with PISA, he noticed that, especially for boys, and especially in the non-English-speaking countries, that those who were choosing a 10 on life satisfaction also had very low standardized test scores. Maybe there's a reading comprehension problem. There's something going on there that, I don't know, we're still trying to figure out.
15:16 Laurie Santos? Another interesting thing you saw in the World Happiness Report data, as I understand it, is there was this little slight bump in life satisfaction when teens were on social media just a little bit. What was that about?
15:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, so for girls, for examples, where we really see this pattern, and it's across most of the regions, those who said that they used social media for less than an hour a day had the highest mean life satisfaction. It could be that, yeah, if you're using social media in that limited way, maybe you're just communicating with your friends a little bit, seeing a couple funny videos and then getting off. But it's such an interesting pattern because the mean life satisfaction is a little lower for the non-users of social media. But at least for girls, we also see in most regions that those who didn't use social media at all were the most likely to have that very high life satisfaction. Choosing a 10 on the 0 to 10 scale.
16:08 Laurie Santos? So to clarify, on average, the happiest girls were the light users of social media, the ones spending less than an hour a day on these platforms. But when Jean looked at the teens reporting the very highest life satisfaction, that perfect 10 out of 10, those tended to be the girls who said they didn't use social media at all.
16:26 Speaker 01 So it's a little more complex than some of the other studies on this topic.
16:30 Laurie Santos? Across the world, the report showed that minus a few puzzling exceptions, heavy use of social media is really not great for young people's well-being. Which means that if we really care about teen happiness, we should find ways to limit their time on these platforms to less than an hour a day. But how on earth do you do that in a world where these tools have become completely ubiquitous forms of social connection and entertainment? We'll be back with Jean's answer to that when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.
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21:22 Laurie Santos? When psychologist Jean Twenge first began researching the connection between social media and teen mental health, it was mostly an academic question. But over time, this issue has become much more personal, both for her and for the three daughters she's been raising. It's this family challenge that Jean discusses in her most recent book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World.
21:44 Speaker 01 So in 2016, when I was working on that research, they were nine, six, and four. And now they're 19, 16, and 14.
21:54 Speaker 02 So it seems like the adolescents you are studying have turned into adolescents that are in your own life and in your own home and who have their own technology struggles in your house.
22:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:04 Speaker 02 What's that been like?
22:05 Speaker 01 It's been interesting. I mean, pretty much everybody I know was a kid over the age of about five, and many with toddlers too are struggling with this. And I think it becomes especially hard, you know, late elementary school, when more kids start to get smartphones, when more kids end up having school laptops, and then middle school hits, and then the smartphone seems to become almost the norm, and so does the school laptop, and the devices are multiplying, and it just becomes really hard.
22:36 Speaker 01 So the collision of my research life and my life as a mom trying to figure out how to stem this tide and how to make the best choices for my own family resulted in the 10 Rules book. I was frustrated because so much of the advice that was out there, whether it was online or in other books or other experts talking about in interviews, it was squishy. Like, what age should a child get a smartphone? It was, it depends. So I've been asked that for 10 years. When I first got asked that, I'm like, deer in the headlights, I have no idea. So I kind of went back to the, it depends. And then I realized at some point, that's actually horrible advice. Can you imagine having this discussion with your 12 year old? We'll do this when you're ready. We'll do this when you're the most mature.
23:19 Speaker 01 They're going to bug you every minute of every day, try to convince you that they're ready and they're mature and so on. You need to draw a line in the sand, like we do for alcohol and driving and everything else with teenagers. Let's choose an age and run with it because that's easier. If you do like we ended up doing in my house, you get your first smartphone with your driver's license. Then that's it. It's a line in the sand. It's done. Conversation's over.
23:47 Speaker 02 Why is the driver's license so key there?
23:49 Speaker 01 So giving kids real world freedom. The ability to get around on their own, which is another huge generational change that kids and teens don't have as much independence as they used to. High school seniors are a lot less likely to have their driver's license now than they were in the eighties, for example. And I like tying the driver's license to the smartphone because, you know, first smartphone's a tool. It's useful when you start driving. I like the Maps app. It's good to have that. But it's also then, it's not the choice that so many teens have of, well, I don't have that license. I don't have a way to get around. I really want to spend time with my friends. Mom and dad are busy. They can't drive me, so let's just go on Snapchat.
24:34 Speaker 01 So if the smartphone's with the driver's license, then you don't have that false choice. Then it's, I can get in that car and go do something with my friends.
24:42 Speaker 02 It also gets the kids who are a little reluctant to get their driver's license, getting their driver's license, which is awesome.
24:47 Speaker 01 Exactly. And I know that because that's my 16 year old. I don't think she would be motivated to get that license if it wasn't for it being tied to the phone.
24:55 Speaker 02 So interesting.
24:56 Speaker 01 In a big city, you can modify that. If it gets at least sixteen and getting around the city, you know, on public transportation. I live out in the suburbs, so it's the driver's license here, but in the middle of New York, it would be different.
25:06 Speaker 02 And as you point out, as a society, we do this for so many other things. When they're gonna vote? When can they join the military? When can they drive? We have rules about this. And that's one of the first things that you talk about in your book, why it's called Ten Rules, is that you argue that we need rules, not just conversations.
25:22 Speaker 01 I always want to say from the outset, we should have the conversations too. I have a list of things you should talk to your kid about in terms of, you know, online safety and everything else. But they're not enough. They're not enough against the peer pressure, the billions of dollars that social media companies have poured into algorithms. It's just not enough. And that's why it is helpful to have the rules to try to do everything you can to keep them off social media until they're at least sixteen, if not eighteen. And that can be hard to do, but it is easier if, when you give them a phone, don't give them an actual smartphone. Give them a flip phone or give them, what my kids have is a phone designed for kids. I call them basic phones. They're calling it a kid phone and they don't want to use it. Even at ten, you know, I don't want the little kid phone.
26:07 Speaker 01 But those types of phones look like an Android phone, so they don't stand out as much. They can still text their friends. So we have to counter that narrative of like, if my kid doesn't have a smartphone or my kid doesn't have social media, they'll be left out. I'm here to tell you it's not true. Your kids can absolutely have friends and communicate with them without social media. But there's generally in most of these, no internet browser, no social media, no gambling apps, no dating apps, and no AI girlfriends and boyfriends. That last one is the one that terrifies me the most these days. Is that if you hand your kid a smartphone with no parental controls on it, there is nothing to stop them from having their first romantic relationship, romantic in quotes, with an AI chatbot.
26:49 Speaker 02 Oh, man. Could you imagine if back in 2016, when you were first looking at this, we knew that this was like on the horizon, yet another thing to worry about with our kids?
26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:57 Speaker 02 It's incredible.
26:57 Speaker 01 It's just becoming increasingly common for teens to be wanting to do AI sexy chat, or AI girlfriends, or even just for platonic friendship. They're turning to them for advice and companionship. And we already have a loneliness crisis. We already have a lot of teens who are alone in their bedrooms way too much and not getting together with friends in person. So what is that going to do to their friendships and their relationships? When they've had these early experiences with these psychophantic chatbots that always tell them they're right, that never sleep, that don't have any of their own needs?
27:37 Speaker 01 It's really scary. It just reinforces and makes even more important the need for having some concrete rules.
27:46 Speaker 02 I know you've talked about this idea that the adults are in charge, which is one of your first rules.
27:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:50 Speaker 02 Why is this so critical to remember?
27:52 Speaker 01 Look, you know, I think a lot of parents now, and I put myself in this category. When we have kids, we think it's kind of weird that we're the authority figure now. Even if you wait till you're older to have kids like I did, you know, like, wait, am I in charge now? What's going on with this? We live in an individualistic society. We live in an era when we have the idea that everybody is equal. But you're the parent, and you have to take on a little bit of a different role. And that feels unnatural to a lot of us, I think. Our own parents said no. And they said no a lot. Sometimes they didn't even have a good reason. And yet we seem kind of afraid to do that, especially with technology.
28:30 Speaker 02 Problem is then, of course, parents are disappointing their kids, at least in the short term. But this is something you point out in the book as well, and also something that we talk a lot about on the Happiness Lab, this idea that the point of parenting is to not raise kids, but to raise adults.
28:43 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:43 Speaker 02 Tell me about the advice that you got with your own kids and how this ended up sticking with you so much.
28:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. And at this point, I'm not sure I can even remember who told me that, but it has stuck with me ever since. It's such great advice that that is your job, to raise a successful adult. Your job is not to make your kid happy at every single moment. And that makes your job a little harder in some ways. But even in kind of the short, long term, it can make your job easier. Because if you have those rules and stick with them, even when your kids are toddlers, if you have said no, and you have tried to keep them safe, not just in the real world, but online, and introduce technology later when they're more ready for it, then they're
29:30 Speaker 01 less likely to have those mental health problems and more likely to do all the other things we need them to do, like sleep and spend time with their friends in person and exercise and maybe read a book every once in a while and help them be more successful adults.
29:49 Speaker 02 And so one of the ways you do that as a parent is to set rules about technology-free zones. What are some of these zones that you recommend? Which ones are the most important?
29:58 Speaker 01 Well, the most important overall is no phones in the bedroom overnight. It's just so important for people of all ages. Tons of studies on this. People do not sleep as well or as long if that phone is in the bedroom, even if it's off, much less lighting up with notifications.
30:15 Speaker 02 Around the holiday times, as a happiness expert, I'm often asked, is there a particular gift we can give our kids to make them the most happy? And I always say, get them one of those old school alarm clocks, the plastic kind, underrated, happiness-boosting gift.
30:28 Speaker 01 Yes. My youngest, who's 14, that actually was one of her big Christmas gifts was a very fancy alarm clock that lights up with sunlight and you can wake up to different noises. Or there was one, and this was especially great because we live in Southern California, that went, dude, dude, it's time to wake up.
30:50 Speaker 02 I love that. I think one of the most dastardly things cell phone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in your phone because then you think you can have it when you're sleeping there.
31:00 Laurie Santos? So far, we've talked about what individual families can do to protect kids' mental health. But when we get back from the break, we'll zoom out. We'll look at what we should all be doing as a society to deal with this challenge. We'll also hear what even experts like Jean sometimes struggle to follow their own advice when it comes to limiting technology. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back.
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35:41 Laurie Santos? One of the most important places where experts are tackling kids' growing dependence on smartphones is in schools, where the battle for kids' attention is happening in real time. In the last year, many districts across the country have begun experimenting with a ban on phones during the school day. But I asked psychologist Jean Twenge, do those bans actually make a difference?
36:01 Speaker 01 So that research is still emerging. We really only have a few good studies, but they tend to point toward mental health benefits, especially for girls, and then academic is where you get the biggest benefits of no phones during the school day, bell to bell. Because then you preserve the social time of lunch and passing periods for students. It's actually easier to enforce if it's the blanket bell-to-bell ban as opposed to classroom-by-classroom, and teachers don't have to police it. There's also a bunch of studies on high school and college students that even expand that to say, hey, even laptops, tablets, these are also a problem, that when people take notes on paper, they get better grades, especially on comprehensive exams. It's that deep understanding that seems to
36:45 Speaker 01 be compromised when people are distracted by electronic devices. And we have to think about this. We're talking about the PISA dataset. Well, one of the main things that's come out of the PISA dataset in the last couple of years is that test scores are down around the world. And those declines aren't just due to the pandemic. They started around 2012, just like all of these other trends. Another project that I did with the PISA dataset was the 2022 survey had a question asking students how much time they spent using electronic devices for leisure purposes, so noneducational purposes, during the school day. And the countries where the students were spending a lot of time for leisure purposes on electronic devices during the school day had a much more severe decline in those standardized test scores.
37:29 Speaker 02 I mean, especially being a professor at Yale, I always get parents telling me, oh, what can my kids do to boost their academic performance? It's like, fight and get phones out of your schools. That's gonna help significantly.
37:39 Speaker 01 The idea of no phones during the school day has really gained traction in the last year or so. And a lot of schools are having a lot of success with that. They're seeing kids paying more attention in class. They're talking at lunch. They're finding, especially after the initial adjustment period, actually fewer discipline issues, because there's not the drama over social media and other things. So that's really a good development.
38:01 Speaker 02 So that's the no phone zones. But sometimes when I hear the retorts parents go to, and they're like, no, no, no, my kid needs a phone. One I often hear is like, I have to give my kid a phone so I can get in touch with them. There are fears that parents have about, you know, school shootings and these awful things.
38:16 Speaker 01 But they're actually safer without access to a phone in that situation. School safety experts are pretty unanimous on that because phones can make noise and alert shooters to where people are hiding. They can tie up bandwidth that is needed for police and first responders. And if they contact their parents, which like, sounds comforting, but isn't really gonna help. In fact, it's gonna hurt, because then parents are gonna rush to the school, and then the police and the ambulances can't get through.
38:41 Speaker 02 You've also argued that you're just solving one problem, but at the expense of lots of others. What do you mean there?
38:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I think this is a dilemma a lot of parents have faced. You know, there's this very strong belief today that your kid has to have a phone to be safe. It's more about the parent's anxiety than it is the kid's safety in many, many, many cases. You know, admittedly, there are practical reasons, especially once your kid gets a little bit older and they're traveling around more, that you might want to get in touch with them. But you try to solve that problem by giving them a smartphone, in many cases, without any parental controls on it. And you create a problem that's gonna be happening eight hours a day, every day. Which is that your kid's gonna be staring at that phone all the time, whether that's social media or texting or internet or games, whatever.
39:30 Speaker 01 You're creating 200 other problems. Part of it is, you know, is a lot of people talk about it's a collective action problem. I am hopeful about there being more regulation and more laws, especially for minors around social media and AI chatbots. I don't know when or if that'll happen in the US, but Australia took that bold first step of doing that for social media, making it 16 and they have to verify age. So I'm hoping that that will catch on, that more and more countries will do that. Cause I think that would make an enormous difference for kids and for their parents. If nobody 15 and under was on social media.
40:07 Speaker 02 I'm guessing at least some parents might be listening right now and thinking, oh crap, I already gave my 13 year old a phone. What do I do? What if it's too late? What advice do you have for those parents?
40:16 Speaker 01 I get that question a lot and sometimes people are resigned about it. They're like, oh, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Well, yeah, you can. You're the parent. You pay that bill. You absolutely can. So when I get this question, I usually ask first, you know, how old a child are we talking about? So we're talking about a 15 year old. I'm like, okay, sure. But put some pretty strict controls on it, like no downloading apps. You can't use it for anything but calling after 9pm or something like that. But if you're talking about 13 and under, take it back and give them a basic phone. And say, I made a mistake and that's on me. I'm going to give you this phone. You're still going to be able to text your friends on it. If you want to have a couple of games maybe, but they'll have a time limit. And it's this phone or nothing.
41:02 Speaker 01 Most kids will say, okay, that's cool. I want a phone where I can text my friends as opposed to nothing.
41:06 Speaker 02 I also like this idea of just admitting as a parent that, you know, you made a mistake. These tools are new. You're trying to figure it out too. And what your goal is, is to do what's best for them, what's safest for them.
41:15 Speaker 01 And you know, the reaction is going to depend on the kid. For some kids, it might be volcanic, which shows in many cases that there is kind of an addiction problem here. If the reaction's that extreme, it does happen, but. It will go away. It will extinguish. It's just gonna take a little time.
41:33 Speaker 02 And you're parenting for the future. You're parenting for the future.
41:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. And that's what you gotta think about.
41:38 Speaker 02 I'm also curious, we've already talked a little bit about the mechanisms that increase young people's prevalence of depression and anxiety and things like that. Do those mechanisms stop? Like, are they just as bad for adults, people in midlife and older too? Do we know?
41:52 Speaker 01 There's not quite as much data on older adults, but there's a good amount. And those studies also show that the more hours a day someone's spending on social media, or the more frequently they check social media, that the more likely they are to be depressed and lonely.
42:06 Speaker 02 We've talked about all the strategies and the rules you bring to your kids. Do adults need rules too? And do you follow the rules all the time yourself?
42:14 Speaker 01 So I didn't have any social media at all until right before my iGen book came out in 2017. Ironically, because that's my book that talked about social media use being bad for mental health. Because I went to a meeting with my publisher and the young social media and marketing manager said, am I spelling your name wrong? Because it looks like you don't have any social media. And I said, that's right. I'm the last person of my generation who never had a Facebook page. So yeah, I don't have any and I don't really want any. He's like, well, you probably need to get something. Okay.
42:53 Speaker 01 At the time, this isn't as true anymore, but at the time Twitter was the platform that was most used by academics and journalists. So I joined Twitter. And yeah, it was Dickens. It was the best and worst. I made some connections through that platform with other academics that were really beneficial. But there's a lot of really bad stuff, really bad stuff. And it is now an even worse dumpster fire than ever. So I don't spend a lot of time on it anymore. I do go and look at it and it is, I learn a few things every once in a while. And I still post occasionally, but I mean, there is a reason why I chose not to have any social media to begin with.
43:36 Speaker 01 I think I have an addictive personality. I'm compulsive about certain things and. You know, at its height, when I was using it, maybe in 2018, 2019, a little bit more, it became that, and I did not like that. But I'm sure they would have loved it if I was putting up Instagram reels and I probably should be doing that, right?
43:55 Speaker 02 Should for the success of the book, but there's a little hypocrisy there.
43:59 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely. So, I mean, part of it is, yeah, with the topic, it would be somewhat ironic, but I'm sure it would sell books, but would it be good for my mental health to be making a video and then worrying about how many views or likes it got? No, it would not.
44:16 Laurie Santos? If there's one takeaway from all this research is that technology itself isn't the enemy, but in a world where our phones are within reach 24/7, the limits we set around them do really matter. And that applies whether we're a teen, an adult, or even a researcher studying these questions directly. For more tips on how to develop a healthier relationship with smartphones, check out Jean's newest book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World. If you have thoughts about today's episode or about the connection between social media and mental health, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at [email protected] or leave us a review and tell us what resonated. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free
44:59 Laurie Santos? newsletter on my website, drlaurysantos.com. That's D R L A U R I E S A N T O S dot com. And if you're curious to learn more about what's in this year's World Happiness Report, then tune in next week because we'll be speaking with world-renowned legal scholar Dr. Cass Sunstein about his chapter in the report.
45:19 Speaker 05 People are trapped. They are kind of forced into a situation where they're on social media, even though they would be happier if social media didn't exist.
45:31 Laurie Santos? That's in the next episode of the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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