Episode Summary 02: The Anxious Generation: What Parents Need to Know

The challenges facing kids today are real, but they're not new, and they're almost certainly not caused by any single factor. Social media might be one small piece of a really complex puzzle, but for most kids, it can be a coping mechanism for everything else they're dealing with: academic pressure, climate anxiety, economic uncertainty, family stress. When we focus only on taking away the coping mechanism without addressing what kids are coping with, we miss the real opportunity.

Hi, I'm Adrian in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From tooth brushing to sibling fighting to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not. That's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episodes soon.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Over the past few weeks, I've released a four-part series diving deep into Dr. Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. Parents have been asking me for months: "What do you think about this book? Should we ban our kids' phones? Is social media really destroying our teens' mental health?" I know not everyone has time to listen to four full episodes packed with deep dives into the data behind the graphs in the book. So today I'm giving you the key takeaways from all 4 episodes in around about 15 minutes. By the end, you'll understand what the research actually shows, what's helpful and what isn't, and how to make decisions that work for your family.

Before we dive in, I want to be clear about something. I'm going to tell you when research is flawed or when claims aren't supported by solid evidence. I explained in episode 1 that I was skeptical of the book even before I read it, because I’d seen a couple of critical reports on it. But I didn’t go into reading the book with an agenda, I’ve been too often surprised by the research for that. I very rarely know where an episode is going to end up before I start working on it. When I first started the podcast, I didn’t have the training and experience to be able to spot all of the problems in the way the studies are set up and interpreted that make it hard to rely on their conclusions. Now I do and I see my job in these episodes as helping you to distinguish between solid research that can guide your decisions and flashy studies or books that make good headlines but poor parenting advice.

Let me start with the biggest finding from this whole series: The teen mental health crisis is real, but it's not what most people think it is, social media isn't the main culprit for most kids, and the solutions everyone's talking about often make things worse. Here's what I found when I dug into the research: Yes, some teens are struggling with mental health challenges. But the dramatic "surge of suffering" that Dr. Haidt describes is largely based on misleading data and cherry-picked statistics. The increases we do see are often much smaller than they appear in the book, and sometimes they’re due to changes in how we diagnose and track mental health rather than kids suddenly getting so much worse. It also looks worse in the book when you present a lot graphs that show the same kind of trend in the same direction. But when you’re picking only the studies on the parts of the studies that show the particular data and you’re ignoring the parts of the data that don’t show that, it seems to present a united front as it were as we think of in parenting when actually the data is much more kind of all over the place than that.

When teens do struggle, social media is relatively a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Family relationships, academic pressure, sleep, and economic security all have much bigger impacts on teens’ wellbeing. For some vulnerable teens, social media does cause real harm. But for others, I would especially LGBTQ+ youth and kids in marginalized communities, it can be an absolute lifeline. And the solutions being pushed everywhere, the phone bans, the strict rules, the more adult control, often end up backfiring because they address symptoms while ignoring the underlying needs that drive kids to their phones in the first place. Kids use phones to meet needs for autonomy and for connection. When we take away their phones without addressing why they want them, we're like taking away a crutch without healing the broken leg. What actually works is much harder but much more effective: building strong relationships where kids feel seen and supported, giving them real autonomy over meaningful decisions, and addressing the actual sources of stress in their lives which often include the pressure we adults are putting on them.

So that’s the overall message. Let’s look in a little more detail at what we covered in each episode so you can decide where to dig more deeply if you want to do that. In part 1 in this series, we focused on whether there really is a mental health crisis among teens. Dr. Haidt fills the first part of The Anxious Generation with a lot of dramatic hockey-stick graphs showing huge spikes in teen depression, anxiety, and self-harm. They look terrifying. Now, I'm going to tell you why some of these graphs can be misleading, not to be negative, but because understanding this helps you make better decisions for your family. When you dig into the actual numbers, some of these "massive increases" are changes of about 0.2 points on a 4-point scale. That's like the difference between saying you're "somewhat happy" versus "moderately happy", there’s a difference there but it’s tiny. It only looks dramatic when you only show that tiny change on a very big scale, the actual change itself is very small. Even more important, a lot of these increases happened because we changed how we track mental health, not because kids suddenly got much worse. Between two thousand nine and two thousand fifteen, we started requiring depression screenings for teens, insurance began covering mental health services, hospitals updated their computer systems to better track things like self-harm.

When it becomes easier to get diagnosed and treated, more people get diagnosed and treated. That’s not a bad thing, that shows up as an "increase" in the data, it might actually mean we're getting better at helping kids who were struggling all along. Some researchers will argue that these changes haven’t caused the increase because some of the data come from researchers who just ask teens if they’re feeling depressed. But if an increasing number of teens are getting diagnosed with depression, or if they know their friends are and they know the signs now when they didn’t know that before, it seems like they could be more likely to say in a survey that they feel depressed if they’re having those kinds of feelings. Now, I need to make a quick correction from my original episodes. An eagle-eared listener pointed out that the community in the book Life Under Pressure that’s name "Poplar Grove", is actually more likely refer to Severna Park, Maryland, not Palo Alto, California as I had thought. Severna Park really kind of flies under the radar a bit on this, I couldn’t find much about it even after listener Andy called my attention to it, unless I was using the community’s real name in my searches. So I thought that Poplar Grove must be a fictionalized Palo Alto, California which has documented suicide increases.

Whether we're talking about Palo Alto or Severna Park, these were communities that had everything experts say should protect kids. They had tight social bonds. They had super involved parents. They had shared values. They had safe neighborhoods. And yet both of these communities experienced teen suicide rates that were four to five times the national average. It wasn’t Instagram or TikTok describing this trend, it was the relentless pressure to achieve to get perfect grades, to get into the right college, to excel at sports, to do unique volunteer work for college applications. And kids who looked like they had it all together were often carrying the heaviest emotional loads. This matters because it shows us that academic and family pressure often have much bigger impacts on teen wellbeing than social media does.

So what about social media specifically? This is where things get really murky. The research on whether social media causes depression and anxiety is mixed at best. I know in the episode it might sound like I'm just criticizing studies, but here's why these matters for you as a parent, if you make decisions based on flawed research, you might end up trying strategies that don't work or even ones that backfire. Many of the studies that claim to show that social media harms teens have really serious problems. Some tell kids they're studying "digital wellness" and surprise, the kids figure out pretty quickly what answers the researchers want to hear. Others rely on kids reporting their own screen time, which is notoriously inaccurate. The best research we have suggests that for most teens, the direct impact of social media on mental health is actually pretty small. What has much bigger impacts? Well, those family relationships, sleep, economic security, academic pressure, the quality of their friendships. Here's what makes this complicated, social media does seem to have real negative effects for some particularly vulnerable teens. But also, for other kids, especially LGBTQ+ youth or kids in marginalized communities, it can be the real lifeline. It connects them to supportive communities that they can't find in their real-life schools or neighborhoods and that’s the bigger problem in my mind.

This is why one-size-fits-all solutions, like we’re going to ban social media, we’re going to ban phones doesn't work. Banning social media might help some kids, but it could literally be cutting of life-saving access to support for others. Speaking of bans, this brings us to what schools and parents are actually doing about phones and social media. Twenty-one states are now studying or have implemented phone bans in schools, which was the subject of part 3 in the series. Dr. Haidt and Dr. Jean Twenge both recommend strict rules at home, too, which we looked at in part 4. But here's the problem with the "just ban it" approach, it often backfires. I shared a story in part 3 about a gym teacher whose school implemented phone bans. Kids started stabbing through the pouches with pens, buying magnets to unlock them, bringing decoy phones. One kid even started a side business charging other kids to unlock their phones. But what really struck me when I read about the article was this teacher's attitude. When a student didn't want to participate in gym class, he'd tell them: "This is what life is about. You have to learn to do things you don't want to do and fake enthusiasm for them." This perfectly illustrates what's happening here. Kids are drawn to phones because phones meet some of their core needs, for autonomy and for connection. They get to make choices about what they watch, who they talk to, what they learn about. School very often doesn't give them those things.

So our solution is to take away the one place they can meet these needs, without ever addressing why they're turning to phones in the first place. We know from research on drug prevention that "just say no" approaches don't work. The D.A.R.E. program in the eighties and nineties not only failed to reduce teen drug use, in some cases it actually increased it. The program focused on willpower and abstinence without addressing the underlying reasons kids use drugs: stress, trauma, social pressure, curiosity. Does that sound a little bit familiar? Those are a lot of the same reasons kids use social media. And what happens when we try to control our kids' behavior too tightly? They don't learn to regulate their own behavior. Think about kids whose access to sugar is severely restricted, they're often the ones you can't tear away from the dessert table at parties. Or consider that almost half of college students drink alcohol monthly, and 30% binge drink, even though half are under the legal drinking age. As soon as they get out from under their parents’ thumbs, they’re heavily into doing things they hadn’t been allowed to do before. When we focus on control instead of connection, kids learn to hide things from us. And then when they really need our guidance, when they see disturbing content, when someone asks them for inappropriate photos, when they're being bullied online, they can't come to us because they're afraid of being punished for being on a screen in the first place.

So what can you do instead? Here are strategies based on the research that actually is solid. First, focus on your relationship with your child. Strong, supportive relationships with parents are one of the most powerful protective factors for teen wellbeing. This means having open-ended, non-judgmental conversations about their experiences, both online and offline. Listen more than you talk. Don't rush to provide all the answers. Second, collaborate instead of controlling. Instead of imposing blanket rules, involve your child in setting healthy boundaries around technology. Ask them questions like: "How do you feel after spending time on different apps? What helps you feel connected to friends? When does screen time feel good versus when does it feel draining?" Help them develop their own internal compass for navigating digital life. If you jump straight to banning phones, your kids will never tell you when phones become a source of difficulty. But if you listen first and ask for their ideas, they're much more likely to want to work with you.

Third, look at the real sources of pressure in your child's life. Are you putting pressure on them about grades, even if you mean not to do that? Are you constantly checking their homework or asking about test scores? Do you find yourself talking about other kids' achievements in ways that create comparison? And remember, sometimes it’s the kids who seem like they’re on top of everything who are feeling the most drained by being on top of everything. Talk with your kids about what success means to them, what support they need from you, and whether they're getting enough rest. Fourth, examine your own phone habits. Kids learn more from what we do than what we say. If you're constantly checking your phone during family time, that sends a message about what's important. And finally, create opportunities for your child to have real autonomy and responsibility outside of screens. Maybe they can get a job, or start their own business, or volunteer for a cause they care about. When kids have meaningful ways to make decisions and see the impact of their choices in the real world, they're less likely to seek all their autonomy through their phones.

Here's what I want you to remember from this whole series: The challenges facing kids today are real, but they're not new, and they're almost certainly not caused by any single factor. Social media might be one small piece of a really complex puzzle, but for most kids, it can be a coping mechanism for everything else they're dealing with, academic pressure, climate anxiety, economic uncertainty, family stress. When we focus only on taking away the coping mechanism without addressing what kids are coping with, we miss the real opportunity. The opportunity to build relationships where kids feel truly seen and supported. Where they have real autonomy over meaningful decisions that matter to them. The teens who are thriving aren't necessarily the ones with the strictest phone rules. They're the ones who feel genuinely connected to adults who see their struggles and support their growth. You can't ban your way into that kind of relationship. It requires the much harder work of really seeing your child, listening to what they need, and supporting them in developing their own solutions to the problems that they face. The phone isn't the real problem. The phone is just revealing problems that were already there, problems with how we've structured childhood, how we've designed education, how we've organized family life in the absence of enough support.

Your relationship with your child will shape how they turn out much more than their relationship with their phone ever will. If we take away their phones but push them away from us at the same time, we're not going to get where we want to go. That's a lot harder than taking away a phone. It's also a lot more likely to actually work. If you want to dive deeper into any of these topics, you can find the full four-part series in your podcast app. I've also collected them all of for you at yourparentingmojo.com/theanxiousgeneration. I’ve also created conversation scripts to help you talk with your kids about screen time in age-appropriate ways, there are versions for tweens, teens, neurodivergent kids, and kids who are being seriously impacted by social media. You can find all those on the episode page for the fourth part of the episode or on the summary episode page at yourparentingmojo.com/theanxiousgeneration. So, there you have it, the key ideas form a couple of hundred hours of research and 4 hours of episodes in a roundabout of 16 minutes. I hope this short summary has helped you to understand the take-home messages from these episodes, and given you some direction on where to dig deeper if you want to do that. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having in parenting, just email your one-minute video or audio clip to support@yourparentingmojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.