Why social media bans won't work and what we parents can do: Professor Candice Odgers

The global story that this generation is somehow damaged or worse than we are is just not supported by any of the data. It makes a better headline to tell us a scary story about young people, and that's not just this generation. This has been something that has been true historically. We're all staring at the phone, but missing a huge set of other threats to our children.

Are smartphones and social media damaging our teenagers' mental health, or could we be missing what's really going on? This is a huge question for those of us parenting a teenager right now. It can feel as though there's an emergency everywhere we look. Anxiety and depression are rising. We're told attention spans are collapsing. Social media is toxic, and that the phone in our teenagers' hand may be responsible for all of it. But what if the evidence doesn't actually support that story? You're listening to Parenting Teenagers Untangled, the audio hug for fearless parents. We're trying to wonder more and fear less. My guest today is Professor Candice Obtrus, one of the world's leading developmental psychologists and an expert on adolescent mental health in the digital age, she is professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and has spent more than 25 years studying children and adolescents, following young people over time, and examining what the data rather than the headlines tell us about their lives. She's also a mum of teenagers, so she has skin in the game. Candice, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. Thank you, Rachel, for having me on. This is such an important topic, and I'm excited to dig in. Yes. Now, one of the most reassuring parts of your talk is that, by many measures, teenagers are doing remarkably well. Violence, alcohol use, teen pregnancy are down. Educational attainment is up, and I discovered all of this when I was researching for an episode a few years ago, and it really surprised me because that's not what we hear. And why don't parents hear that story? Well, it makes a better headline to tell us a scary

story about young people, and that's not just this generation. This has been something that has been true historically. So, something adults tend to do is look at the next generation coming up and think that they are not using their time wisely, that they're doing worse than us on so many metrics, and that our childhood, some romanticized version of it, was so much better than whatever they are are doing. There might be some truths and pieces of that, but the global story that this generation is somehow damaged or worse than we are is just not supported by any of the data, and it's actually not supported. You know, as a parent of teenagers and someone who has coached youth sports and spent a lot of time with young people, it's sure not supported by what I see every day by these incredible young people around me.

It's so funny. I was doing a personal training session today, and the mother. She's got a teenage girl who's 12 years old, and she said, "Oh, my daughter's on the sofa all day long in her pajamas, on her phone. She's just doing nothing. I'm so worried. I'm so. And one of the other women said, "So, what do you think you did in the summer holidays when you were her age? And she went. Oh yeah, pajama. Yeah, okay, okay. And we do. We forget, don't we? If you could correct one thing, parents are currently believing about teenagers and technology. What might that be?

Yes, I think that you know, and this was a surprise to me as a parent and as a researcher when I first started into this field. So we first started in about 2008, actually, on young teenagers' devices, and so we got to see every day what they were doing, what they were looking at, how that interacted with their sleep and well-being. And I assumed at that time that this influx of digital technology would have a big effect on everything from sleep to attention to mental health. And the biggest finding so far has been this real distance between what we all believe, which is that this is the biggest thing that's impacting our child's health and sleep and well-being and relationships, and what the data actually shows. And so, what we find is very tiny associations in different directions, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Different for different groups, and so there's just this massive gap between what we're told every day as anxious parents about how our young people are doing and what the biggest contributors to their mental health are, and what we can actually see when we look at this very closely with young people with reliable instruments, with data streaming from their phones, and so that's been surprising for me. And I've had a front row seat to this, so I imagine it's surprising to your viewers as well.

I think it is, and I think when viewers hear things like that, they would often think, "Who's paying you to say this? Like, are you in the the pocket of one of these corporations because surely it's obvious that this is a problem.

Yeah, and so I have gotten that reflex

is oh, she must be you know her research must be funded by big tech. It is not. It's funded by the National Institutes for Health, the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research, and so this is not big. Tech paying me to say this. This is just the data, and so I'll often say that I'm not on the side of the phone-free childhood, and I'm not in the child of the band of the you know tech is a savior of anything. I'm on the side of young people and evidence, and I think they really deserve for us to slow down and take a careful look at you know what is the evidence, especially when we're talking about serious things like depression, which is one of the number one causes of disability worldwide. You know, things that threaten the health and safety of our young people. And here, I'm a Canadian, but I'm based in the United States. And every time I point out that actually guns are the number one killer of children in America, I'm accused of working for big tech, right? And so I, I, I, you know, I, I don't know how that. That's just math. Like that's just actual data of what is the number one killer of our children. And so I think you know that's an extreme example of how we're all staring at the phone, but missing a huge set of other threats to our children.

So, in other words, what you're saying is

this panic about phone use and about the way that our lives are focused on digital technology is actually a distraction from some of the other things that actually are much more important. Is that? Am I getting that right? Yeah,

I completely get the uncertainty and the panic and the you know wanting to maybe take a safety first approach. You know, we're not sure, so I'm going to be more conservative. I mean, our children are the most important things in our lives, and we we make all kinds of choices as parents-some the rational and some that aren't. But I think my concern is I'm in a lot of conversations about adolescent mental health and how to support young people, and the conversation about social media and smartphones-it really just sucks all the air out of the room, and so we stop seeing young people. We stop seeing what they really might need from us. We stop seeing what we've known for decades, and what research is really pointing to as some of the big drivers of adolescent mental health problems. And instead, we think, oh, maybe this simple solution of shutting off the phone or banning young people from social media will save them and help them avoid these outcomes that we're so fearful of, right? And so there's, you know, there's no judgment here of having this reaction, right? We're we're parents. This is what we do. We're anxious. We worry about everything, but we're just constantly being fed, you know, honestly, misinformation about the major drivers of of mental health, and and every time I say that, people will say, "Oh, you know, you're dismissing the harms. I am not. You know, I started my career working with young women who had been sexually exploited, and these are issues that are near and dear to my heart. But I think if we want to solve those issues, we need to start asking. Okay, in that context, what are the ways that tech helps by helping those young women get out of those spaces? Right, finding support when they need it, finding community when they need it, and what are ways where it might amplify risk and introduce new risks that aren't present in their offline world. So, having a more nuanced discussion about those harms, I think, is really going to help us stop those harms.

So, what are you seeing then? You know, if you're saying, "Well, it's not it's not just the phones that's causing this these mental health problems, which are really definitely rising. They're definitely a problem.

Yeah. So we are. So there's a couple things to think about. There are places where they're rising. They're not rising worldwide, and so I think that's a story that's being told about youth suicide is rising all around the world. That's actually not true. There are places where it is rising. So in the United States, in Brazil, in the United Kingdom, in Japan, we're seeing increases in youth suicide, and many, many other countries were not. And so, this is not necessarily a global phenomenon. With that said, you know we are seeing increases in things like reporting of depression, of ER visits, of young people talking more about their mental health problems, and we need to-we've always needed to pay more attention to youth mental health, but especially now when we see these signs. So when I see that, I look at kind of what the main contributors have been, and the main predictors are typically events within the family. So these are stress and abuse within family settings, early exposure to adversity, academic pressure, and pressure to succeed is one of the most common things that young people report to us on a daily basis of what is a daily stressor for them and what predicts their day-to-day mental health, right? So those kinds of stressors, and then we've had some really big global shocks, right? So the sociologist friends among among us will talk about a poly crisis where we've had a great recession, we have rising income inequality, we have displacement of young people around the globe for climate, for conflict, and so I think those those bigger issues, you know, those are those are things that young people see and experience, and we need to take those into focus too. But it's more complicated than just shutting off the phone when I start to. List those factors, you know, parents, and start to feel a little overwhelmed as well. It's not a simple solution, right? We can't sit here and address climate change or gun violence by ourselves, but I think we can acknowledge that the factors driving our young people's mental health are are a lot more complicated than than just the phone.

Yes, and I saw when I was talking to Dr. Lucy Fuchs about what they had been seeing with their research that actually, if kids are more depressed offline, more lonely, you know, have more problems, they're likely to have more problematic use online rather than the kids who are relatively healthy, have got loving families, and and I mean, what are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, that's the other. So, if the first main thing that we found is that there's this gap between what we're told and what we see, the second main finding is that offline risk is the biggest predictor of online risk. So, young people that are struggling offline often go online more, looking for help, for distraction, for coping. So, part of what we've been thinking about is you know everyone's pointing this causal direction into what does tech do? It's this kind of techno determinism. So what does tech do to us? And we ask the question of what are young people looking for when they go online, and they're often looking for support for health or for help, sometimes for distraction or entertainment, and the motivations of what's bringing young people into those spaces is important, and in part because we can meet them there with some of the services that they need and might not be getting other other places, and so I think that's a huge issue. We also know that young people who are more vulnerable offline are more likely to encounter offline risks, and you know, an example is a study we did in the UK. It followed 2000 young people from the age of five to 24, and we asked them and saw them in their homes. We interviewed their teachers and their siblings, and and them, and we found out how much they had been cyber victimized during adolescence. And it turned out that 20% reported an experience of cyber victimization, and that is horrible and shocking. And you know, one in five children are experiencing that. But what we also had was information about abuse they had experienced offline in their homes and schools and communities, and all but 10 of those young people, all but 10 had experienced harm offline, and when we looked forward to predict adult problems or later problems, it was the offline problem victimization that was predicting, not necessarily the cyber victimization. And now that's not to say that cyber victimization victimization isn't important, but we can't look at it in isolation, right? The real drivers are really what's happening offline in in these children's lives.

Now, in your talk, you said that adult mental health is one of the the cornerstones of of how we need to be looking at this topic. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so we've known for a long time that caregiver mental health matters for young people. There's tons of research in epidemiology, for example, showing that even maternal depression or mental health in pregnancy predicts how children do early on. Right, so this is a big, you know, reason that we try and provide services for families pre, you know, in the prenatal period, and then in those early years when they're first starting to invest in young people, so caregiver mental health matters a huge amount here. And what we've seen in the United States, in particular, since about 1999, adult suicide has been increasing, right? We and we've seen since between 2010 and 2021, and this is the period that everyone seems to focus on because smartphones, you know, became more prevalent. We saw a doubling of overdoses and deaths by firearms among parents during that period, and so this is really shocking to me that everyone's looking at this period and saying, "Oh, these two lines go up together. And so, when adolescent suicide starts to go up in the United States, it's until 2008. And so, what you have is a situation where adults have been struggling right for at least a full decade beforehand. An opioid crisis. 2008 was the Great Recession, a huge economic shock. We see youth suicides start to tick up at that point, and then we see these doubling of deaths among parents for firearms and overdoses, and so, and people are just looking at the phones. So I'm not saying it's only the parents' mental health that's important, but that sure better be part of any conversation we have about that uptick, right? In terms of thinking about how to better support families and children, and that's an extreme example of deaths. That's the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of distress that adults are feeling and expressing during that period. It's

interesting because I did an interview with Sharon. Boise about friendship and adult friendships.

Yeah,

and the reason I went to him because he specializes in adults was because when I read his data, I thought, well, if if adults aren't capable, if they're not, if they're lonely, they're struggling with friendships, and the friendships that we have are the one of the most important anchors in our lives that that sort of there is no solution for life, but that's one of the the best things we've got. If we're not actually coping, then how are our kids supposed to do this? How can we support our kids properly? It's actually really important. So, what would you say to parents about how they should approach this particular topic given this information,

yeah, I think the the point you're raising is a really important one because what parents often do or what adults often do is they kind of project their own use or their own isolation onto the next generation. And so it's interesting because one of the things we do is we follow young people with their consent around on their phone each day, right? And so we get snapshots of them at home and at school, and you know, having coached middle school basketball, if you actually go into a middle school and you stand there during the break time, you will have a sensory overload, right? In terms of the noise, the chatter, the activity, and as an adult, most adults spend a lot of their time alone, right? Especially post COVID, and they select when they want to engage. I mean, there are some jobs where you don't have; they don't have the luxury of doing that. But adults tend to be more isolated, and adults use social media in more kind of passive and probably unproductive and unhelpful ways. But young people, from the time they wake up in the morning, they have to engage with people. They have to engage with us as parents. They go to school. They have to engage with teachers and with peers after school. They have programs and sports and coaches, and so they are. There's this idea that young people today are isolated and don't interact with people. I would ask whether we're thinking of ourselves, right? Our adults. Gosh,

this is so important.

Right, because young people are constantly engaged, and when they come home, they are spent, and sometimes they want to just zone out. And you know, social media is a new TV because YouTube and Shorts, like that's what they're consuming. We consume television. They're zoning out a little bit. Maybe they're playing online with their friends, and so I think a little bit of empathy and a little bit of pause before we assume that our reality is their reality. They are hyper social in so many, so many ways, and their use of technology is very different than the way adults use digital technology and social media, and ironically, we're in the situation now where we have adults who are making these rules and policies to ban and to kick young people off, having very little understanding of young people and how young people use technology, and so that's why I'm afraid that we're on this collision course to spend a lot of resources, time, and energy on banning and blaming and trying to take things away, when we all know you cannot ban your way out of the youth mental health crisis. Right? You need to build and not ban. You need to invest in young people and adults and the places that they are versus just take things away. And so we know that as adults, right? We need to pause and remember it.

Great, and so many times I get parents telling me something that's really concerning them, and I'll say to them, "Can you hear that? Your that's your fear, like you're projecting onto your child because of something that you've seen in your own family, and you think your child's suffering from that. But and then they just go, "Oh, oh, oh, yes, and this drive to be social is is part of being a teenager. It's very important. But like you said, if they're spending all day being stimulated, maybe they just want to come home and flop in front of what their version of the television is is now, and then we panic because we think, oh, they're not doing something important. I've spoken to a lot of parents who get very strung up by how important it is to monitor and track their kids and and know what's going on. I think we get this impression that these children don't know what they're doing. Like they're on this device and it's it's really dangerous and and we need to somehow control it. And I I actually when I speak to teenagers, I find that they quite often have much more knowledge and understanding than parents even do about what they're doing and this attempt to try and control it doesn't necessarily help with that connection. So, what what do you think about this fear that we have and this desire that we have to monitor and control? And where do you sit with that?

Yeah, so I'll start by saying that yesterday my teenagers spent a lot of time trying to teach my husband how to identify an AI-generated video, and he would so he would stop sharing them in the family group chat because it was you know it's just getting to be too much, and he can't see it. Like even when they you know like spend 15 minutes pointing out the obvious tells, he is unable to see it. So I think you know I'm not saying that every teenager is incredibly tech literate. But they are definitely have strengths that that we do not we do not on mass. So the other part about this, you know, control versus communication. I mean, this is an old idea, and so one of the things that I often when I talk to parents, you know, many of the things that we know how to how to keep our kids happy, safe, and well, those things haven't changed. So tech hasn't created this new species of teenagers where we have to change our entire approach. And so, just like once our you know our children reach adolescence, we're not going to be able to surveil them at the mall and at school and with their friends and when they're out you know doing things away from us. We need to lean into our communication skills to understand what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, you know, open up that communication so they will tell us when things go wrong. And I think the the the point you raise about being open and non judgmental is so important because the biggest things that the teens in our study tell us is that they do not tell adults if something bad happens online, because they're afraid they'll take the phone or device away, and that is just heartbreaking because so many things that go wrong or go sideways online could be stopped or aided by an adult coming in to help versus you know shut it down. And so I think that's the thing I learned as a parent in terms of supporting my kids when they got a new device or a new platform. Was no matter what happens on here, I won't shut it down or take it away. If something bad happens, I want to help you fix it, and I and I hope that that has helped. So I think you know you're exactly right. At a certain point, when they're younger, it's easier. You have full control, right? You can set the time limits on the iPad, and you can set up a account unless you're in Australia on YouTube, and you can tailor what they see. You can do all of these things to really curate the experience and scaffold it. But the scaffolding is going to look different, and the online experiences are going to look different when they get to adolescence. I think some of the harder things, and I've I've done this too. Is I've gone in when my teenagers were younger into the games and played them to make sure that they were okay. And that actually turned out to be kind of fun. We had some shared, you know, experiences and jokes around it. And if you have that luxury of having that time to do it, I would highly recommend it because it you know it can be fun, and it shows that you're interested in the worlds that they're interested in.

That's an absolute key thing I found. You know, regardless of whether I find it utterly tedious, I'll try and take an interest because then they, you know, there's a connection there. And then they, they, you know, my daughter loves Bojack Horseman. She's much older now, but I've sat and watched that because I know that's important to her. One of them also told me that her friend had said to her mother she was really struggling with obsession with eating and and her mother the next day took away her devices because she said right I'm going to stop this and so the daughter said to my daughter so I'm never going to tell her anything ever again why would I because this is not what I needed and I think to parent that really was a gut punch. I think that's very sad to hear that, and that's a that's a loving mother who's just trying to do her best. So you know, no shade on her. But that's that kind of illustrates the problem we're talking about. So, what would you say healthy autonomy might look like at sort of 1113, 1517, Are there the guidelines that you think which should we should have?

Yeah, it's so interesting because there's such a desire for a bright line age of the child. What age should I give my child the smartphone or social media? And one of the things that I like to have people think about is when is the family ready? Because this isn't just the child being ready; it's when the family is ready to have. You know, the caregivers are ready to have the time to scaffold that experience or make sure that they're, you know, it's it's a kind of a safe and you know enjoyable experience for them. And so, an example is when we decided to give our children smartphones, and that was actually at age 11, which many people say, "Oh, that's really young, but for us, they were still in elementary school. We knew all of their friends. The next year, they were going to be moving to a big middle school that was attached to a high school. Entire change was going to happen of their social groups with their school. They're going to go from two teachers to eight teachers, and so we wanted the time to teach them how to use the device responsibly in that time where they were walking to our neighborhood school, where we knew all their friends, where we could set limits and scaffold that ways, and and we also thought that they are ready to responsibly not lose a device or not be you know constantly distracted by it. I know this is frustrating when academics say it depends on the child and the family and the context, but it really does depend on the child and the family, you know, in the context, and I also say to

parents that one of the things I think is really helpful is to look at your own use before you start handing a device out. Because if you're constantly using your phone when people are around, if you're using it during the meal times, if you're taking it to the bedroom with you, then you've got to understand that your child is going to think that's what's normal and that's what should be. And kids don't know what's normal in other houses. They take what you do as the way that you should do things. I've withdrawn my use anywhere near a bedroom deliberately and putting my phone outside so my kids can see it, and then they give me theirs. But it's a it's a two way discussion rather than just me saying, "Well, I can have my stuff, but you can't have yours, because from then on, they're going to spend their entire time thinking. At what point can I have, you know, full autonomy? Yeah. I mean, one thing that I think is a problem. I've spoken to a big group of 16-year-old girls, for example, and I said,"What would you say if you were told that we were going to take away Instagram? And they just went, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, or Snapchat or whatever, and they panicked about it. And I said, "What if all girls your age had that taken away? They said, "Oh, that would be lovely. That would be so nice. And I thought, "Isn't that interesting? And I I remember when I was a teenager buying magazines like women's magazines, and then realizing after a while I was feeling terrible about myself, and when I stopped and thought about it, I thought it's magazines, and so I stopped buying them. But these kids don't have that option if the if those social media platforms are available to them. How would you say we can navigate that?

You just brought up so many things there. So the first thing, taking away Snapchat, it's not really about taking away the platform. It's what would you say if I said I was going to take away all your friends and your ability to contact all your friends, right? And so I think the connection now-the fact that they're connecting on a corporate platform, which does not have their best interests in mind, which does not protect their data in the way it should, that does not have the safety by design standards that we've all been pushing for a long time-that's a problem, right? But I think that the reaction is more driven by this connection that they all have. This is the places place where they go, and you know, if we take that away, they're going to go and figure out somewhere else to go. You know, the the beauty image issue and the issue around young girls. Now, this is where I might get myself into trouble. You might have to cut, but there is nothing that scares a society more than little girls becoming women, and young women have been centered in this tech conversation sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for not so good reasons. And historically, it is not necessarily new that we have been pushed on realistic body images, right? If you think back to you know, you gave the example of when you were growing up, six men in Hollywood decided what the female archetype of beauty was and shoved that, shoved that in every in every medium. The interesting thing now is that when you sit down and we sit down in focus groups with young people, and they show us who they're following. They follow based on things around interests, common interests, religion, you know, common, you know, like music interests, and so there's a a more diverse range of people out there that they can identify with, and this actually changes over adolescence. So as they get older, they're more likely to select into following people that make them feel good. Now there are subgroups of young women who are very vulnerable to things like eating disorders and are going to be selecting into some negative content. So the example you gave earlier, and we know that young people who are struggling offline are going to struggle and seek out information online that could make a bad situation worse, and that's where we need to come in very strong in terms of regulation on the algorithms and recognize as someone surrounding a young person who's struggling offline that they're going to need a lot more support navigating that space and also other spaces that they're in, so not just the online space, but the issue around you know young girls being at the center of this. It's interesting in a society where the biggest offenders online are men of things like sextortion and misinformation and making the internet a really bad and toxic place. And our solution is to really worry about the young girls and try to kick them off when the vast majority of them are using this in a pretty productive and pro social way. And so I think this whole issue is around young women is very complicated and very layered. And as a parent of a young woman, I I live this you know Every day, and worry a little bit that you know we're blaming young girls versus seeing the larger kind of problems that are out there with with the platforms, with perpetrators on the platforms, and really hardening those safety controls to to make make it a safe experience for them online.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're very much in the camp of companies should be held responsible, not forcing kids to withdraw from everything that's available.

Yeah, yeah, and so I think that when we get into the social media ban discussion, what we. Do is we allow companies to say, oh, we banned young people under the age of 16, and we see in Australia when you do that, 85% are still on the platform, maybe more, right? Not necessarily making a dent in it. So young people are going to be there anyway, and so the bans kind of allow us to to say that you know young people are off, so we don't have to fix these things that we we know shouldn't be present for all of us, right? I don't want an algorithm that's targeting me constantly with toxic material or negative content or having strangers being able to contact me. You know, when I have those safety design design settings that are available and could be set, and so I think the you know the bigger issue is really, and I said this in the talk was, you know, adults really did break the internet. It is broken in so many ways, but trying to fix it by kicking kids off is just not going to get us there. We broke it. We should fix it. Yeah, and and it's and also kicking kids off is not going to fix the problems we are worrying about as parents around mental health and around learning, right? So I think that's the solution we're all being sold as parents. We're being told a very scary story. We're being told over and over and over again, and we know from like 50 years of communications research that the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true. And so many of us believe that this is true. Many of us believe that social media is the devil and that it is destroying an entire generation of young people, and you know the evidence for that just is not there. Now that's not to say there are no harms online and there's not social media companies aren't awful in so many ways and we need to regulate that, but this story about our young people, you know, I think it's it's dangerous because it shames a generation that is actually looks good on so many metrics. They're at a stage in the lifespan where they're just better than us. I mean, they learn faster, they live louder. You know, they feel more deeply. Right. This is the this is the stage of life where we should be helping them to. My colleague David Yeager would say, set high expectations and then work like hell to support them and get them there. Right? I mean, that's something that we've known for a very long time, and I think in the the tech space now, to kind of throw that known, proven model away and say, okay, we're just going to ban, we're going to blame, we're going to shame, and we're going to hope that shutting everything off solves these things we're worried about is, you know, is unfortunately not going to do a lot to support young people, and it's not going to fix the broken internet.

And I love your point at the start of this was all to do with well, okay, maybe we're just looking in the wrong direction. We're using up so many resources trying to control something, but are we looking at the wrong thing? And from your talk, which I thought was brilliant, you're talking about investing in adults and in communities. So, do you have any sort of ideas and suggestions about what we can be doing in terms of resources and how, with a focus, you know, for parents now, what could we be doing to help our kids in a much more productive way?

Yeah. So teenagers get to the age, but they don't want adults in their spaces. That's true online and offline. And what we've done is we've just like slowly taken away spaces for young people to gather. We've created curfews. We've outlawed young people from being at the mall by themselves, unaccompanied, and then we blame them for not being there, right? So that that's not fair. And so opening up physical spaces, allowing young people to have skate parks, to be at the mall and the beach, right? After COVID, everything was locked up in schools near us where they couldn't access the playgrounds. You know, we had so many pickup games, community games of sport and those types of things happening, you know, bring those back, right? So let young people be in these spaces. Maybe there'll be some damage to the space, right? You know, that's that's a risk we might have to take, right? Maybe we might have to think about some adult supervision, depending on who's there, right? And and kind of training around that. But we need to open up the world to young people, and I think this is also a very something that's very graded by social class, and this is not talked about as much. And so, one of the most interesting things that we find is that time online is anywhere from about 1.5 to two hours per day longer for teenagers who are growing up in low versus high income households. And now, this is the investment gap the economists have talked about for a long time. That you know families in the top 20% of the income bracket are spending increasingly more on extracurricular activities, so their children are overscheduled from the time they wake up to the time they go to school and they go through their tutor and their sports team, these young people are putting in the hours, right? And they are occupied, and they might have one or two hours a day free. And when they have that, they just want to crash out or talk with a friend online or consume something. Young people who don't have those resources and families who do not have those resources. Nurses don't have access to these lower cost, free activities, these open spaces. Right? We have the police being called. The United States, we have ICE being called. It's heartbreaking, and so then you see that teens from those backgrounds are online more, and there's differences in their mental health. Well, there's all kinds of differences in those households in terms of what those families are providing, the supports they're providing, and then we attribute it to the phone versus structure, right? In terms of social structure, in terms of opportunities that young people have, and so the opportunity gap in having those places to play and be with peers, and you know, kind of build for the future are huge, and they stratify across social class. And we have to find a way to reduce that gap. And part of it is building spaces where all young people can spend time freely out among us without being shamed or silenced or arrested.

Coming back to those parents who are overscheduling, and again, Jennifer Brennie Wallace said that you've got kids now in these very wealthy areas of the United States and probably in the UK who are now so overscheduled that they're suffering as much as kids who have difficult lifestyles just because they're so stressed. What are you seeing in the data

the reasons for young people being depressed or feeling stress vary tremendously across social class, right? And so we have in the lower income households worry about family and safety and money and resources and you know the higher end we have intense pressure on success and college placement and you know an uncertain world that they're going into in terms of what those jobs might look like and the status that's associated with those, and just performance, you know, on high stakes testing and placements. And so, it is incredibly tough to be a young person today for all kinds of reasons. Some empathy from the from the adults, which go a long way.

And as you know from the data, they're not drinking as much. They're not smoking. They're not having sex. What are they doing to relax? I know. I'm joking. Candice, is there is there one message if if everybody forgot everything that they'd heard so far? Is there one message you'd like to get across to parents who would be listening to this?

Yeah. So I think you know, as a parent, I'm I'm tired of being fed a narrative around fear around young people that young people who I know who are amazing on so many levels, and so I think we have a choice to make as parents, and part of that choice is that when we look at our young person, is if all we can see is their phone and their device and social media, we are going to miss seeing what they need from us, and we're going to miss out on incredible opportunities to spend time with them, to be proud of them, right? To communicate with them and to enjoy the stage of life, because I mean, as you and I both know, with teenagers, it goes fast. It goes so fast, and watching them become these incredible young people that they are-I mean, we need to do everything we can to support that growth versus shame them for the behaviors that you know we don't like because they don't fit the archetype of what we thought the perfect childhood was. And if I think we watched a video of our childhood, we might not think it was so perfect. Quite,

and just I just wanted to pick up on one thing you said, which was what we need to give them. What do these children need? You're studying all these kids; they're telling all this stuff. What do they want from

us? I think that they need us to listen versus tell them, or think that we can solve things, so they are incredible problem solvers, right? So they have the best vantage point, and oftentimes when they're raising something with us, they don't want us to answer it or solve us. They want to be heard, and they will work it out. And the solution they come up with is going to be actually better than the one we would have told them. Maybe the other part is is just pausing, pausing with the panic, and this is hard, right? Because the stakes are so high. But taking a second, you know, sometimes I'll take a second, I'll leave the room, I'll go out, I'll take the dog for a walk, and just think it through before I have the conversation. And sometimes we make a mistake in the interaction, and that's okay. You know they get mistakes, and they appreciate when we say we might have made one, and we want to start over.

I make so many mistakes. My girls are so grateful because it gives them permission to make mistakes and apologize. What a great discussion! Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking all this time to to talk to us. I'm going to put the link to the TED talk. Please listen to it. So good. You are being talked about regularly on LinkedIn. Your your TED talk has made so many people stop and think and want to write things about it. So I'm deeply grateful that you've actually stepped up and and made people see a different angle.

Yeah, I just I hope we can broaden the conversations because our our young people they they deserve it and we. Deserve it as parents. I don't want to parent in fear.

The fear is just awful. It's just it's so debilitating, and it doesn't help anybody. Well, if you found that useful, please right now send it to somebody who might find it helpful, who's struggling with all of this, who might be very fearful. Anybody that you know in your community, and if you want to get hold of me, it's www for my website. My email address is teenagersuntangled@gmail.com, and I have actually written a Substack series about exactly what Candice has just been saying about this. You know, how do we pause? How do we stop and just calm ourselves down when we feel ourselves reacting, and that that comes from a place of fear, and then instead respond and talk to our kids in in a way that will help them. And that's just my Substack. I'm sure you can find it. And that's it from me. Have a lovely week. Big hug. Bye bye.