What the data shows about youth mental health (w/ Candice Odgers)

“Social media and screen time aren’t the most important factor in teen mental health,” says development psychologist Candice Odgers. While this claim sounds counterintuitive, Candice shares why it’s so pervasive—scary stories sell. They always have. In this episode, Candice joins Chris to discuss social inequity and the five areas that would be more effective in helping improve teens mental health than banning social media. Featured guest Follow Candice Odgers on LinkedIn https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/linkedin.com/in/candice-odgers-a75124265 and at https://candiceodgers.com/Watch Candice's TED Talk https://www.ted.com/talks/candice_odgers_what_we_re_getting_wrong_about_teens_and_tech Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Right now, we are in the midst of one of the biggest parenting crises in recent memory. And the source of the panic is social media. It makes sense, right? Like, we know as adults how horrible we feel after wasting hours on Instagram. And we're constantly inundated with news stories talking about how kids are seeing horrific images online and rotting their brains and being sucked into extremism and crime and disaster and everything bad. It makes sense. It seems like a no-brainer that everything wrong with kids today could be traced back to social media or is at least being made worse by it. And yet, today's guest is going to challenge that entire premise. In fact, she's going to argue that today's kids are finding real value

• 3:00Speaker 00

  in connecting with each other online. And one of the things that I appreciate most about a good TED Talk is how it can change the way I think about an issue by presenting me with new compelling evidence from a real verified expert. And that's why I think today's guest, Candice Rogers, is someone so interesting to listen to. She goes against a lot of conventional wisdom, including the premises of several bestselling books, and instead, looks at the data that she has collected over a career as a quantitative and developmental psychologist specializing in adolescent mental health. What Candice has found surprised me, and it might surprise you too. Here's a clip from her TED Talk.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  One of the most consistent things we have found is that the stories that you and I are told repeatedly every day about teenagers today, that they are lost, that they are worse off than ever, that somehow smartphones and social media have destroyed them and their brains, it doesn't match the data. And it doesn't match what they tell us. There is a massive gap. And as I've tried to make sense of this gap, I keep coming back to a simple truth that we all know. Scary stories sell. They always have. And the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true. I'm going to say it again. The more often you hear something,

• 4:20Speaker 04

  the more likely you are to believe that it's true. Right? And scary stories are really easy to sell to parents. We are an anxious lot. The hypervigilance, it hits us. When we hold that tiny baby in our arms, our entire world changes. It hits again when they hit puberty, and they begin to change in these dramatic and rapid ways, when our sense of control over them and what comes next begins to feel less certain. I get this. My 15-year-old is six foot four. My 12-year-old is embracing independence like she's leaving for college next week.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  But the good news is, is that the real story about teens today is far more positive and far less frightening than the stories we all read. They have made remarkable progress on metrics that really matter, and we know a lot about how to keep them happy, safe, and well.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  We're going to talk with Candace all about what works and what doesn't in just a moment. But first, a quick break.

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• 8:47Speaker 00

  And we are back. We are talking about how to support young people with Dr. Candace Rogers.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Candace Rogers. I'm a developmental psychologist. I've been working with teens for the past 25 years to help understand their lives online and off.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  So Candace, you have a big idea about teens' mental health, which is that we are really getting it wrong in the way that we talk about how to deal with teen mental health, especially in the United States, but really around the world. What is it that we get so wrong?

• 9:16Speaker 04

  So I think what we're getting wrong is the first thing, and often the only thing we're talking about these days is their phones. And to me, you know, working with young people, being a parent of teenagers, coaching young people, that's the last thing I see. That's the least interesting thing that I see about them. How they use their phone, or why they're going to their phone, that starts to get my interest. But just what do phones do to kids? That's not an interesting question to me, or as interesting as the young people themselves.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  It was counterintuitive, at least for me, that we constantly hear that social media and phone use is terrible for teenagers, and it is the reason why they are going through a mental health crisis. And you said that basically, years and years and years, 25 years of data, have just not shown that at all to be true.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is a thing we constantly hear, and it's a really scary thing. So as a parent of teenagers, you know, I constantly have to check my assumptions against data, because we hear it so often. And we hear it so often that we believe that it's true. And the most interesting thing for me in this time of working with young people and being on their phones and trying to understand what factors influence their mental health, one of the most interesting things has been, you know, this distance between what research is generating day in and day out, and then the stories that were being told about how this is a dramatic predictor of teen mental health, that it's driving the youth mental health crisis, that there's these big effects that we see, and that there'll be massive effects if we turn it off. And I'm not saying that the book is closed and we know all the

• 10:51Speaker 04

  things. We certainly don't. But it's certainly not the case that the science that's being produced right now supports these massive policy actions and these beliefs that so many people hold today.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  One of the things that I took away from your research is that a very important predictor of teen mental health and young people's mental health is the mental health of the adults around them. That that is significantly more important than whether they use social media, whether they, the amount of screen time they have, and that there actually is a giant adult mental health crisis, which is what we really should be focusing on.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've known for a long time, from all kinds of fields, from like psychiatric epidemiology, from sociology, from psychology, from education, that the health and the behavior of adults around young people is one of the most important things that shapes their behavior. And this is true even in the perinatal stage of maternal depression, and then after, you know, afterbirths in young toddler years to childhood and adolescence. So parental mental health is super important and very predictive of how young people, you know, are going to do in the world. And so, you know, considering that is, is often not in the conversations that we're having about young people has been really confusing to me. You know, why aren't we having more conversations about how to better support

• 12:12Speaker 04

  the adults around young people? There's a lot of debate about whether or not we're in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. And I'm kind of less interested in whether or not adolescent mental health has been increasing, because I always have thought we've underinvested in young people. So I told you I've been doing this for 25 years, and it's always been the case that one in five young people have struggled with some sort of serious mental health problem. Back then, it was things like conduct problems and violence and substance use. And now it's an uptick in anxiety. But I've always thought we underinvest, we need more attention. So, so there's lots of debates about whether or not the increase is real, or how much of it is due to changes in reporting, or kids being more comfortable talking about it, or all kinds of diagnostic changes, or

• 12:54Speaker 04

  a real change. But the thing that we're not talking about is it's very clear that we are, live through an adult mental health crisis in the United States. I mean, those data are just crystal clear. In 1999, the adult suicide rate started marching up, and it did not slow down until around the time of the pandemic. And, you know, those increasing rates we saw between 2011, 2021, the rate of overdose and deaths due to firearms and drugs doubled among parents of children in the United States. And so, I'm not saying that that's the sole cause or the only cause. When it's something complicated like mental health, there's lots of things that contribute. But the fact that we're not having that conversation about adults is also surprising to me.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  A reason why I think a lot of people have this reaction to the idea that screens aren't the problem, or social media isn't the problem, is because we see how bad it makes us feel as adults. Like, we see how detrimental, for example, me, I can go on Instagram and know that I've spent way too long on Instagram, and then I feel how much worse my own mental health is. So I think, of course, stopping kids from experiencing this must be a good thing. I kind of had the thought of like, if I could press a button that would send everyone in the world to a pre-social media era, I would press that button right away, because it would help me so much. And I feel like a lot of policy is being built around that kind of an idea of what if we could create that world for

• 14:23Speaker 00

  kids, which of course, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. And I think your research shows that that actually might be a harmful thing if you could, that there are benefits to this rather than costs.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  I love that comment, because it reflects so much of what we see every day, which is adults, those that make policies and, you know, parents. We make all these assumptions about how young people use their phones and their devices, based on how we use it. And it is different. So, one, we're kind of bad at it. Well, I'm much older than you, so I'm really bad at it. But we're worse at it than young people in all kinds of ways. And we use it in very different ways. So we might go online and doom scroll the end of democracy and the news feed and just a constant. And we might have went online first because we were bored or feeling bad. Like, that's an important part of this. Young people go online to be entertained, to connect with their friends. You know, we're all talking

• 15:18Speaker 04

  about social media, but most of the action for young people, and we see this because we're on their devices, getting streaming information from it, getting them to report what they're doing, happens in group chats. So it's in Discord, it's on a text chain. They're, they're viewing social media, and they're listening to music, and they're listening to entertainment. But the action, the peer-to-peer interaction is happening in these offline, more private chats. And so it's a little bit of a different model for how they're using technology.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Can you talk to me a little bit more about the actual research? Because I, you alluded to the idea that you're, you're getting real-time data about what kids are doing, not just what we think they're doing. How do you actually do the research?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So one of the things when I first started in this area, I know everyone started reporting that, you know, kids who use more or spent more time on screens looked worse on all kinds of outcomes than kids who use less screens. But to me, that was a little bit weird, because you were comparing children who spent six or eight hours a day on a screen to children who spent one or two hours on a screen. And those young people who spent one or two hours, if you look at the data, they're actually from higher income households. They're over-scheduled. They only have one or two hours because of all the resources in their families and communities that have them in after-school programs and in school and, and doing other things. So it's not really a fair comparison to then say, oh, it's the screens that cause all these differences when we know. So what we wanted to do is

• 16:42Speaker 04

  answer the question that a lot of parents have, is that, you know, when my child is on their screen or spending more time on social media, does it impact the things that I care about, like their sleep, or their mood, or their cognition? And so we work with young people, we install devices on their phones, we get repeated surveys from them throughout the day about what they're doing, you know, online and offline, how they're feeling. We use wearable devices, so we capture things about their sleep objectively. And then we follow them repeatedly day to day. And instead of asking the question of whether a child who typically spends one hour a day on a screen looks different than a child who spends eight hours, we say, on a day where a given child spent more or less

• 17:25Speaker 04

  time on their screen, does their sleep look different? You know, does their mood or affect look different? You know, do we see, you know, different types of engagement? And so that allows us to use each young person as their own control and get a little bit closer. We also do some work where we install apps, which, with their consent, and they work with us to make sure that we understand it, that scrapes all of the data from their phones. So what kind of apps they're using, there's keyboards that are installed where we get what they're typing into their device across all of these apps, and try and make sense of how they're interacting with the online world.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  You know, I think a lot of people are probably going to have this gut reaction, which I'm sure you get all the time. Like, that's, it just can't be true.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Like, you're saying that the, that social media isn't the most important factor, or screen time isn't the most important factor in teen mental health. I just don't believe that. So what do you say when people, you know, have that instant gut reaction?

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's surprising, right? And because we don't like it. And so what I try and separate are the things that are really value and normative things. Like, I'm a parent. I'm, you know, over the age of 40. I don't like social media. I wish we could go back to the days of my childhood where life was less complicated, right? And those are values and they're normative things. And most parents, most policy makers want less technology in their children's lives. And that is perfectly reasonable. And I would never, you know, interfere with the kind of the values or what we want for our kids. That's a separate question, you know, how we think about technology and that we don't like it and we don't like big tech or the people that run it.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  That's a separate question from what impact does my child listening to Spotify, or my child watching cat videos on TikTok, or my child doing other things? That's a separate question of like, what impact that has on their mental health or their sleep? Now, there's a whole other set of issues which are about online harms. And we have argued for a very long time that tech companies need to do a much better job of protecting all of us and especially children online, of cleaning up abusive and violent content. I'm not saying that there are no harms online. What I am saying is that we look at mental health in general, that we don't see social media emerge as a strong or a robust predictor of mental health symptoms

• 19:48Speaker 04

  in the way that's being conveyed, kind of in the mainstream media. And I think that's important because you're right, everyone does believe this. And parents are parenting from a position of being fearful and panicked because they can't seem to stop it. Because young people want to be there. That's where entertainment is. That's where youth culture is. That's where their friends are. And it's creating this conflict within parent-child relationships and within families. And we know that conflict is not a great, you know, thing to have when you're trying to address mental health issues or support young people as well. So it's interesting.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  When I think about why the, the narrative is so strong of like, screens are the problem, and we need to get rid of social media for kids, we need to block it, or ban it, or get rid of it. I think one reason why that is a really popular narrative, even though it is not really supported by the data and by any of the big reputable studies, is, and you talk about this a lot, is it's a fear-based story. It like taps into, there's something dangerous and we need to protect our kids from it. That's one. But the other reason why I think it's such a popular narrative is it actually lets the tech companies off the hook in a lot of ways, right? If we say like, the problem is just, we need to make a law that says, you can't get on social media if you're under 16.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  That's a pretty easy law for the tech companies. It doesn't require them to reorganize their business model, doesn't require them to hire a bunch of content moderators. And as every single person who's ever been 16 knows, you can get things that you're not supposed to get when you're 16. You're not allowed to get alcohol if you're 16. A lot of 16-year-olds find ways to get alcohol, cigarettes, things like that. So the people in power have an interest in pushing that narrative because it's better for them. That's my kind of conspiracy theory version.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Can I add to that conspiracy theory?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Oh, please, yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  So not only is it a free pass, and it doesn't force them to regulate the actual online harms in a way that would cost them, it causes us to hand over, all of us to hand over a ton of data. If we have to do age verification, and I have a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old, and we need to prove that they're under or over 16, now you need all my children's data. You need their face. You might need my credit card. You might need to know who I am. We're going to now give all of our information over to companies who've shown us time and time again that they will monetize it, that they can't protect it, that they will use it for gain. And so for me, this is, it's a surveillance thing as well, that we're all marching into willingly without pausing to say,

• 22:15Speaker 04

  wait a second, who do we actually trust having this kind of information about all of us?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a really important point, right? Is like, it goes to, well, how do you actually implement such a thing, right? Like, a lot of policy ideas are good in theory. And then you think about like, but how would that actually work? And the way this works is you have some sort of government ID, or you have some sort of credit card or something. So all of a sudden, there's no such thing as anonymous browsing. Now, they know what you're reading online, what you're looking at, what news you're taking in, what your political affiliations are. There's all sorts of reasons why you wouldn't want governments to know that.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Whether you could get questioned at the polling station, right?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  But the third, the third thing that I also think is a really key one here is, we have, as a society, taken away a lot of the offline spaces where young people would hang out, right? Like, you're not really allowed for most young people to like, go to a bowling alley alone. You don't really like, go to the park and hang out alone. And that's not necessarily just because young people don't want that. It's like, it's viewed as dangerous in a way that it wasn't in previous generations. And so if you take away their offline spaces, and then you also take away their online spaces, you're essentially telling young people that they can't hang out with each other anywhere.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. And young people want spaces where we're not there, right? They want spaces away from adults. And adults don't want them in public spaces right now. So we've, we've stripped those away, and they're, they're finding community, you know, online. And so I think that's maybe the saddest part for me is that, you know, the internet is really broken in so many, so many ways. The solution we're all converging to is trying to fix it by kicking kids off, which we know it won't actually kick them off, and it won't fix the internet because it won't make things better. And we're not doing the, the hard work to create the spaces, both online and offline, to give them the things that they really need to grow up.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  We're going to take a quick break, and then we will be right back.

• 24:21Speaker 00

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• 27:19Speaker 00

  And we are back. You know, I'm a parent, but my kids are young. They're not

• 27:22Speaker 04

  You've got time.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  far away from the tech moment right now. Although you still have to decide, right? Am I going to let them watch screens, watch, you know, a show on YouTube, watch a show on the TV? You have to decide really early on those questions, but it's less of like, are they going to have a social media account? That's still a ways away from me. But for parents who are listening, what concrete advice do you have for them? If you were going to give them three tips, because I think people are getting a lot of concrete advice that is based on flimsy to no data at all.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think the first question everyone asks is at what age should I give my child a phone? And I'm going to give a frustrating answer, but bear with me that there is not a bright line age, but there is an age that works for you and your family. And it's going to differ based on whether or not children can be responsible with the device, or you know, whether or not you as a parent are comfortable with that. If people tell you nothing before 13, that's easy to communicate, but that doesn't actually fit for most families or, um, you know, kind of most issues. I have a lot of parents contact me. They're feeling a lot of shame and embarrassment because they've given their children a phone early. They're often from a split family where the child has to go back and forth between multiple homes and that's been easier for communication.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  The child has been left, you know, due to miscommunication and they're feeling a lot of shame because they're being asked to sign these wait till eighth pledges or, you know, not wanting to tell their peers, uh, their parent peers that they've, they've done this. And so there are lots of different solutions that have worked for, for families. The, the piece of advice that I often give that I've learned from the young people in our studies and it was really changed the way that I parent is that when you're ready to give your child access to a new platform or a new device is to, to make it clear that you're not going to take that away from them if they come to you after encountering a problem. So there is negative content online. They are going to have,

• 29:19Speaker 04

  just like when they go to school by themselves or to the mall by themselves, they are going to have negative experiences. And the young people in our studies would talk about not disclosing those because they didn't want to lose the phone or they didn't want to lose access to the platform because that's where their friends are. That's how they figure out where to meet up, right? And so you can't help them as a parent if they won't talk to you about what they're seeing or what they're worried about or what they're experiencing. And so having that conversation early on, I think has been really helpful for me and it was really enlightening to, to hear young people talk about that.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  That's also an interesting argument against, you know, the, the idea of wholesale bans is that if you're doing something that is not allowed, you're already aware that you're not allowed, then you don't actually have a resource when something dangerous or disturbing or abusive comes in, if you think you might get in trouble by the fact that you weren't supposed to even see it in the first place.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  Right. And that's the big issue with pushing young people into less regulated and unsafe spaces where they're not supposed to be there. And when bad things happen there, which they will, who are they going to tell without getting into trouble? One of the other biggest findings we found in our research is that really, you know, people like to think about what does the phone do to behavior or mental health, but it really is the case that, you know, it's as interesting to understand why young people are going to use their device or where they're going. So what, what are they looking for when they're there and are they finding what they need? And we often find that young people that are really struggling offline are more likely to go into online spaces and look for help. They're also more likely to run into negative experiences online in the same

• 30:58Speaker 04

  way that they are more often to run into negative experiences with a new group or in a new classroom. So if you have a child that tends to struggle in new peer groups or in new situations, they're going to need some extra support online. This is just another setting where young people are going to be and get together and all those same processes will play out. And it just reflects this larger thing, which is, and I said a little bit about this in the, the talk is that, you know, tech hasn't created a new species of teenagers. They still need the things from us and they need the things, you know, they've always needed to develop. It's just they're going to find them, you know, in online spaces and offline spaces as well.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Just to make sure I, I got the three. One thing is when you are giving your kid access to a platform or a device, to make clear that if they share with you something that is disturbing or dangerous or wrong that they've come across, that you want them to share that with you and you won't punish them by taking away their access.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  So that they know that they can. And two is to know your kid, to recognize them as an individual and not to think that this is some sort of universally applicable thing.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  People will tell you there's a bright line or they, they know this special bright line, but there isn't a bright line. So science doesn't point to a bright line because it's a embedded, complicated issue, right? And so this is something where this is going to be about values. Like you might be a parent who does not want technology in your children's lives, right? And that's a decision for you and your family. Science isn't pointing to a bright line for entry, right? You know, your child and you know, the type of support that you're able to give. So for our children, for example, they got mobile phones when they were 11 years old, when they were going into sixth grade, because they were still at the elementary school. They were going to be moving to a big middle school the next year and we wanted to spend the time teaching them how to use it as they went back and forth to school and when we

• 32:43Speaker 04

  knew their friends. And that was a decision we made on the type of school they were in, how much they were away from us, like how much we trusted them to be responsible. And the third one is really, you know, trust your parenting, right? And trust that you know your child. And if you are seeing things where they might be a young person that's really sensitive to rejection, for example, or they're having a lot of peer relationship problems, you know, when they move into those online spaces, we often see a reflection of that happening as well. And so it's not necessarily that it's the phone or the social media doing it. It's just part of, you know, the, the way that children are interacting with the world and experiencing some of those risks.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  And you said that be aware that if you have a kid that does need some of that more support, they're probably going to need more support online. What does extra support look like online?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  So part of the struggle I have in this field is I get sucked into talking about, you know, what is the, you know, kind of worst thing that social media, you know, does and is social media bad for all of those things? When I wish we would spend more time thinking about, hey, all these young people are in these spaces. Um, we have an opportunity to reach them in those spaces and deliver the kind of evidence-based treatments and supports that, that they need and they're looking for. But sadly, when young people go online to find help, they often don't find it in, in those kinds of ways. Um, but there are some creative examples. I'll tell you one example that I really love, which is Katie Salin, who's my colleague here at UCI.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  They run connected camps, which are Minecraft servers where young people go to camp on Minecraft. And I know that might sound way out there, but they have content moderators on these platforms and they have a special camp that's for children who've lost a caregiver. And I talked a lot about caregiver loss in my talk. And this is a, this is a space where young people go. They have counselors online, the moderators that are trained in grief counseling, and they work with young people to build a tribute space for someone that they've lost. And when and if they're ready, they can share it with other young people within that community. Now that's not going to be the solution for every child who's lost a caregiver, but for kids who like to game, right? This could be a really creative way to give them the support they need, to let

• 34:53Speaker 04

  them know that they're not alone and to provide some of the resources to them. So I would love to see more investment in those types of kind of creative solutions for young people that's designing around a specific population or what a specific group needs versus these kind of more global, you know, accusations of smartphones are destroying a generation or making us all anxious, right? Like it's not as helpful to have those kinds of conversations. It's more helpful to like center a kid or a group of kids and what they need and think about how we could we build technologies or other supports and ways that help them and, you know, minimize any potential for harm or risk within that, you know, effort.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  You know, could support include like monitoring or, or looking through young people's phones? Like having more active supervision or, or is that bad?

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is also another thing where we actually know a lot about parent parental monitoring or, or surveillance among young people and that tech has changed the way we can do that, but the basic principles stay the same. So a longstanding finding in kind of adolescent mental health and parenting is that child disclosure, and that means whether or not a child is willing to come and talk to you and tell you about the things that are going wrong, is the best predictor of them doing well and mental health and kind of the relationship doing well versus surveillance, which means the parent constantly checking in and monitoring, right? That tends to indicate that there are problems and, you know, that's fine when they're little. So you have complete control over your child's iPad if they have one, but when they

• 36:23Speaker 04

  get to early adolescence, that's going to have to start to change. And the idea there is that, you know, there's a bit of a breakage of trust if you're surveilling your child online without the kind of cooperation and engagement of them in that process. And so it's this tricky balance. Parents are panicked. A lot of them like to surveil their child's phone just to make sure that there is no risk or they aren't encountering these things. And I completely understand that. But at a certain point, we know from a lot, a lot of work with young people that the surveillance model will only take you so far and it has to be around the communication.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  It's interesting because, you know, with a toddler and a baby, I feel the appeal

• 37:04Speaker 00

  of being able to check a baby monitor when I'm out at a restaurant and it's my wife home with the kids or we're both out and it's the grandparents or something, you know, I, I feel the appeal of being able to look in. But I also intellectually understand that if I look in and the baby is crying, I'm not at home. I can't actually do anything about it. So whether the baby is crying or, or is not, I still have to have trust that the person who is there, who I have trusted with my kid is going to do the right thing. We have a baby monitor that is not connected to the internet that only works locally so that like, I can't know what is happening in the room when I'm not in the house. But it, I recognize that that is just a trigger for my own anxiety. It feels like

• 37:47Speaker 00

  One of the big messages I get from you is that a lot of the work that would actually make a huge difference in young people's lives is parents and adults and caregivers taking care of their own mental health, rather than thinking that more control or more rigid boundaries around what they're allowed to do, or what they're allowed to see, would actually solve the problem.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  So what I love about what you just said was that, you know, when they're little, you're kind of trusting somebody else to help make the decisions when you're not there. You're substituting your parental health. You've given your babysitter or a family member the ability to come in and do what you would have done.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  The trick comes when they get older and then their early adolescent period or adolescence, we have to be able to trust them to make the right decisions. And that means we have to scaffold. So we have to prepare them today to do the thing that tomorrow or the next day, we want them to do alone by themselves. And that's why the ban issues are so scary to me, because we're saying, we'll have this bright line of 16 and we will, you know, if we could prevent them, we would prevent them. And then suddenly they will magically be ready for that versus investing, like what we talked about earlier, more resources into digital literacy, into helping young people develop regulation skills online or integrate technology into their lives to the extent that is possible. And then the other issue with parental mental health, they're called two-gen interventions. So

• 39:11Speaker 04

  if you want to improve the behavior of a child, you also intervene with the parent. So there is a genetic component to mental illness. We know that. So if your child has anxiety, you know, you might be more likely to suffer it from yourself. And that's not a one-to-one relationship. It doesn't always go together, but it's more likely. And so often you find that young people and their parents might benefit from the same types of interventions. And not only does that improve parental mental health, but it gives you more capacity to parent in the ways that are supportive and that we know could be helpful to kids. And so absolutely, let's, you know, not just locate the problem in our young people, let's, you know, provide resources for the family system and school system that's there to support them.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  I want to talk about two things, which, one, we kind of like glanced over because I said it as though it was just a fact. And I know that it's true, but I want to talk more about how you are not giving the tech companies a pass. This isn't just like, actually, tech companies are good. I don't know why people are saying they're bad. But I also want to talk about the parallel with drug abuse, which is just don't do drugs. If you don't do drugs, there's no drug problem. And that, I think we can all agree, was not the silver bullet that solved the drug crisis.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Right? Like, teaching kids to say no didn't lead to no kids doing drugs. It didn't lead to no adults doing drugs. It continued.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  It actually backfired.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  I think there's this parallel where there's a desire for it to be really simple and easy and clean, even if the data is saying that it's not going to be simple and easy and clean. It's going to be complex and expensive and take a lot of time. To combine those two giant questions into one, what role do you think tech companies should play and should be forced to play in solving this problem? Because it isn't just the one just say no solution.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we know in all of our interventions that for young kids, you can tell them what to do. You can implement interventions that can, you know, stop them from engaging in a behavior. Adolescents, those interventions don't work with adolescents because they need to be engaged in the problem solving. They need to feel some sort of respect and, you know, agency in kind of this decision-making. So the science of behavior change with adolescents is super fascinating. David Jaeger has this great book, which is called 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People, and goes through very clearly how the kind of top-down ban approach, even if that's the outcome we all want, is not going to work with teens for all kinds of reasons, right? And so, you know, there's that piece of it. Now, to

• 41:38Speaker 04

  get to the question of the tech companies, you know, they have not stepped into the public square in the way that anybody has wanted. And worse than that, they have monetized, you know, the attention, they have monetized the information, and they have not been good guardians of the spaces where young people are. Like, that is just clear and it needs to change. And I think that there are some really good things that are coming from this movement of accountability in terms of thinking about the change in the features that we're going to be seeing. I don't think the way we get there is through banning for the reasons that we talked about before. I do think the way that we get there is through cleaning

• 42:19Speaker 04

  up these spaces for everyone. If we think about online exploitation, which is something that we all, you know, agree, like, there's no positive function for that on the internet. Right now, what we see is a lot of attention to it, a lot of companies being mandated to report that it's happening online and on their platforms. But we don't see a lot of investment in actually tracking down the perpetrators or punishing perpetrators on the backgrounds. That also, you know, that's a solvable problem on the backend of hiring more FBI agents or prosecuting perpetrators of online harm. You know, if we really wanted

• 43:01Speaker 04

  to make the internet better, we, instead of kicking off little girls, we would probably kick off adult men, you know, that would immediately improve the internet. But we're not going to do that for all the reasons, you know, that that makes sense, that it would be unfair and that it would take away all kinds of opportunity. And we went discriminating against a group like that. But we seem fine to do it for kids. And I understand the protectionism that comes into this space when we try and do this. But, you know, it's it's just not going to work because what we'll end up with is companies saying, well, and they have said this because of this age 13, companies essentially saying, well, we don't have kids on our platform, so we don't need the special protections on data or content moderations, right? When we all know and we can see the new data out of Australia

• 43:46Speaker 04

  shows that 85 or 80% of young people are still on the social media platforms, you know, after, six months after the ban.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  I think that idea, right, of if you want to make the internet safer and you want to ban a group, ban adult men is a very compelling counter example of what would actually make the internet safer. Okay, but let's say I gave you a magic wand. And I said, okay, you can use it five times. How would you address mental health? Let's say globally, but also in the United States.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  One, and this might irritate some of your viewers, but firearms are the number one killer of our children in the United States. We need to do something about firearms killing our children. They're also the most used, you know, in suicide. Suicide risk is just elevated because of them. So let's have real regulation and around firearms. Full stop.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  And also, you want to talk about why kids are scared and anxious, the fact that at school, they're getting the message that it's possible, and in fact, so possible, they have to prepare for it, that someone will come in with a high-powered weapon and they'll have to hide for their lives.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, my second grader at the time, when they were going through all these active shooter drills, was a large child and he couldn't fit under the desk. They couldn't find a place for him to hide in his classroom. So that was the most stressful thing that happened to him, you know, in those days. And we're also seeing, we've seen, you know, everyone's talking about this time when anxiety went up between 2010 and 2020 among young people, while school shootings also increased during that time. So guns are a thing and they kill our kids. Second, the fact that this country does not have real parental leave policies is pretty atrocious. And so we know the first thousand days are fundamental in forming the foundation for young children, right? Mental disorder and

• 45:35Speaker 04

  the risk for that are embedded early in life. And so we need to support parents in those early years to actually be with their children, to have the time to recover from having or welcoming children into their families. And so those types of policies that are supporting parents, I think, are just absolutely crucial. The third is that about 20%, upwards of 25% of children, the numbers have gone down a little bit, but not enough, live in poverty. And when we wrote the report for Common Sense Census, it was essentially one in every two teenagers lived in a low-income household, right? So the the social gradient in health,

• 46:18Speaker 04

  and by that meaning with each step up the income ladder, health gets better, which means at the bottom of that ladder, it is worse. You know, that is just the family and the zip code that you are born into. Redistributing this income in a way that, you know, helps those kids at the bottom, because we know that that is one of the biggest risk factors for mental health problems, you know, in addition to adding an extra burden on caregiver mental health. Pay teachers more. Invest in teachers. Invest in counselors in our schools. Teachers spend more time with our children at a certain point than parents do, right? And many of them are taking second jobs, struggling to make ends meet. The last one, and this is, does involve technology, but it's the opposite side of

• 47:03Speaker 04

  it, which is, we have an opportunity to deliver digital mental health services to reach young people in ways that we have not before. So this is a tremendous opportunity for us to actually deliver services at work to reach people in just-in-time moments. So many people will talk about the suicide risk and whether or not social media causes that. If we're going to talk about suicide, we should talk about the ways in which we could leverage resources, crisis text, text, text line, or the way we could deliver interventions just in time, which is what we know prevents that risk. And so those would be my wishes. I wouldn't spend all of my policy efforts and time trying to ban social media

• 47:46Speaker 04

  and, you know, going around congratulating myself that I'd slayed big tech, but done nothing to actually help kids.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  A lot of the people who are going to listen to this are presumably not parents. They don't have a kid and they might not be interested in a kid. So what role can people who are either not yet parents or never going to be parents, what role can they play in addressing mental health in the age of smartphones, in the age of social media, with the idea that they want to do something that's actually evidence-based, but they don't have a kid that is their direct responsibility?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so even if you don't have children or aren't parenting, you know, in your day to day life, or maybe you're a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle, there are huge opportunities to invest in young people, whether that's through volunteering, whether that's through, you know, attending community events, whether that's through just not kicking young people out of public spaces and kind of checking yourself on the assumptions you might be making about them there. I think the other thing that we can all do is we know that scary stories about teenagers sells. And every generation did this, right? So for my generation, they talked about Pac-Man addiction that was going to rot our brains. And I'm not saying AI or social media is Pac-Man, but I am saying that we can all pause a little bit and think like,

• 49:02Speaker 04

  as we age, that becomes our first instinct, right? To dislike what young people are doing, to not really understand youth culture, so we dismiss it. And so just give people a little bit of grace and spend a little bit more time judging young people on the ones that you really know. And when you do that, you see that they're pretty amazing. And give them a bit of a break as I guess you wish, you know, older generations would have given you in the past.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Candice Odgers, thank you so much for being here on the show. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. We're actually doing a listener survey right now, and we would love your feedback to help us to improve the show. It just takes a few seconds and it would make a huge difference if you could answer those questions. You could find it at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 or by clicking on the link that is in the show description. Otherwise, it is B I T dot L Y slash B H Survey 6. Please answer those quick questions. It will not take you very long and it would make a huge difference to us. Please, please, please go to that listener survey. Okay, thank you so much to our guest, Candice Odgers. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more about me at ChrisDuffyComedy.com, including about my new book, Humor Me, which is out now.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  This episode was put together by a team of thriving young people at TED. Those young people are named Daniela Balarezzo, Van Van Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lot, Tansukasung Manivong, Antonio Lay and Joseph DeBryan. Ryan Lash's video editing is making me look decades younger than the withered husk that I really am. And our fact checker, Mateo Celis, is confirming whether I do in fact qualify as a husk or whether husks reject me as part of their group. On the PRX side, they've promised not to take away my microphone, even if I do something I'm not supposed to with it. That's Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks so much to you for listening. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. Word of mouth is huge for our show. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Until then, take care.

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