250: The Anxious Generation Review (Part 4): Should we ban cell phones at home?

The phone is not the problem. The phone is just revealing the problems that were already there. Problems with how we’ve structured childhood, how we’ve designed education, how we’ve organized family life, and how we’ve built communities. The solution is not in our children’s pockets; it’s in how we choose to see them, and support them, and trust them, and create space for them to grow. It isn’t our phone that will dictate how our kids turn out, the thing that shapes our kids much more than that is our relationship with them.

Hi everyone. I am Denise, a longtime listener of Your Parenting Mojo. I love this podcast because it condenses all the scientific research on child development, compares it with anthropological studies and puts it into context of how I can apply all of this to my daily parenting. Jen has a wealth of resources here, so if you're new to the podcast, I suggest you scroll through all her episodes. I'm sure you'll find one that will help you with whatever you're going through, or one that just piques your interest if you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons Your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one. Sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. This is the final episode in our series on Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. In the first episode we looked at the evidence for the teen mental health crisis, which we found is probably not as bad as advertised certainly for all kids. In the second episode we looked at whether social media specifically is causing serious mental health problems for teen girls, and we found that for some it almost certainly does, and for many it almost certainly doesn’t. In the third episode we looked at bans on phones in schools, and in our final installment today I want to look at whether we should ban our kids from using smartphones and social media at home, or if a different approach might be more effective. As we finish up I’ll tell you where you can get some realistic scripts you can use to talk with your kids about screen time, whether they’re tweens, teens, neurodivergent, or one of the relatively few children who genuinely are at risk of anxiety or depression linked to their screen usage, or if you’re seeing these effects already.

I’m going to draw on a couple of different books in this episode, the first of which is one you can’t even buy yet at the time this episode is being released; it’s called 10 RULES FOR RAISING KIDS IN A HIGH-TECH WORLD: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children's Lives by Dr. Jean Twenge – yes, the same Twenge whose research we’ve been discussing in the previous episodes in this series. That book comes out on September 2nd, but her publicist is WAY ahead of the game because I got my review copy in back in May. The book begins with the chapter heading: "Introduction: The need for rules." Then there's an anecdote from a parent whose child stopped engaging in her former interests after she got a phone, and then another about a couple of teens who report that they hated social media but couldn't get off it because they feared missing out. Twenge criticizes popular advice to teach "digital literacy" because that doesn't mean anyway, and we can't set limits on what kids do because what they do changes from minute to minute. Then she immediately gives us the "10 concrete rules about how to manage kids and the technology that surrounds them." These are the rules: You're in charge, no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight, no social media until 16 or later, first phones should be basic phones, give the first smartphone with the driver's license, use parental controls, create no-phone zones, give your kids real-world freedom, beware the laptop and the gaming console, and the tablet, and advocate for no phones during the school day.

Based on what we saw in Twenge's research in the second episode in this series, I totally get why she sees these rules as reasonable, and Jonathan Haidt would agree with them as well as far as I can tell. I can also see why these rules are attractive to parents. They're super clear. They're easy to understand and communicate, which means everyone knows what to expect. They simplify decision making, the expert told us that this is the right limit, so that's the one we're going to set. They aim to have kids start with healthy habits while they're young, and make sure there's time for non-screen-based activities that we know are important for children's social and emotional growth. And yet... And yet. The biggest issue I have is with Rule #1, you're in charge. And I get that you're the parent. I get that phones and apps and games generally and social media specifically are designed to hold kids' attention for as long as possible. I know they're often successful at doing that to us as well, even with our fully developed prefrontal cortexes. But here's what we know really well: it's hard to change someone else's behavior. And when your Rule #1 is you (the parent) are in charge, that means you the parent are trying to change someone else's behavior.

Nobody likes it when other people try to control their behavior, and kids are no exception. Carys and I have been talking about this recently. I really enjoy hiking, and my husband enjoys mountain biking. I don't hike much anymore, mostly because riding is a much more efficient way of getting exercise. A friend and I hiked around Mont Blanc in Switzerland, and France, and Italy with Carys in a front pack when she was eight weeks old, so I really couldn't have gotten her started with hiking any earlier. But despite all this, once it came to walking, she kind of just refused. She doesn't like hiking. She's never really loved mountain biking either, despite all of my husband's encouragement. He said that he wanted to go biking for Father's Day this year but we didn't get very far, it was hot and her helmet was hurting her and there was a little bit of uphill riding. We kind of gave up just a couple of miles stopped on our way home to get some bread for dinner and my husband had to wait in line for a while for it so Carys and I were talking in the car. And she explained that she's started being willing to hike recently because I had given up. I had stopped asking her to hike. She likes to do nice things for me, and she likes to do things with me, so now she's actually willing to go for a hike sometimes because there's no pressure on her to do it. But when Daddy keeps asking her to ride, and inviting her friends to ride with them, the more he does that, the less she wants to ride. She wants it to be her own decision, just like it's her decision to walk dogs for her business. She doesn't love the walking, she does love spending time with dogs, and she likes getting paid. She's willing to do the thing that she doesn't love, because she's chosen the end goal herself.

I'm thinking back to Episode 234 on The Problem with Time Outs where we heard about parent Claire whose parents reacted to her getting in trouble with 'the bad crowd' by grounding her (because it was the 90s, and there wasn't any social media to ban her from or cell phones to take away). She just snuck out anyway, and they never knew. Twenge says that she knows kids are going to get around some of what we do to keep them offline but that any reduction in the amount that they're online is a good thing. But is it? I'm imagining a kid with whom we have an open dialog about what they see online, who stumbles on disturbing content one day. Maybe that kid comes to us and says: "I saw something online that I have really mixed feelings about. Can I tell you about it?" Or maybe if we've banned our kid from accessing a smart phone they get on one at a friend's house, and they search together, and their friend tells them that what they're watching is cool, and it doesn't feel cool to them but they know they can't tell you because they don't want to be punished for being on a phone when they shouldn't have to be on that phone to begin with.

Kids already know how to create secret accounts. They know how to cover up the Instagram app logo with a calculator icon. It doesn't seem like a massive stretch to imagine them hoarding money and buying their own phone, and then using all these apps in secret, by themselves, and then they can’t come to us and tell us about the really disturbing stuff or even just the weird ads, and the ideas they see in video game chats that aren't aligned with our values, and even the social media fads that encourage them to do all kinds of dangerous things. So they start sneaking all of those things, and then when a classmate or a stranger starts asking them for naked pictures, and they aren't sure what to do about it, and they could really use our guidance, they can't get it. Because they aren't supposed to be on a smartphone, and they don't want to be punished.

Twenge is officially silent on punishment. She doesn't say what you should do when your child breaks the rules. But what else are you supposed to do besides punish them? Haidt tells us in The Anxious Generation that: "the best parenting book that my wife and I read when our children were toddlers urged us to look for opportunities to frustrate our children every day by laying out and enforcing the contingencies of life: If you want to watch Teletubbies, you must first put away your toys. If you persist in doing that, you'll get a time out." Of course as soon as I read that I was desperately curious to know what that book was...so I flipped to the back for the footnote, which is for "Phelan two thousand ten," so of course then I scrambled to the references list, to find that this amazing parenting book is recommended by this researcher who’s telling us how should we handle screen time is “1-2-3 Magic”, which is a book that has parents get their kids to do something by the time the parent counts to three, or the kid gets punished. The idea that we have to find ways to frustrate our child to build what Haidt calls their "psychological immune system" is ridiculous. The idea that finding ways to frustrate our child is the only reasonable alternative to helicopter parenting, where we raise our children in a "bubble of satisfaction, protected from frustration, consequences, and negative emotions, is also ridiculous. Just going through life with another person presents lots of opportunities for frustrations, without us having to create any. We know that punishments undermine relationships. There's just no way you can share how you're really feeling with someone who is going to punish you when you do something they disapprove of.

And what else is happening when we're controlling our child's behavior so tightly by restricting their access to things they really want? They aren't learning how to regulate their own behavior. We often see this in kids whose access to sugar is severely restricted in early childhood, they aren't always, but they often tend to be the ones you can't tear away from the dessert table at family events. We also see a lot of kids going pretty wild with alcohol once they leave home. Almost half of college students surveyed in twenty-twenty two reported drinking in the last month, and half of the sample was under legal drinking age. Almost 30% of them reported binge drinking in the last month. The "just say no" approach has a well-documented history of failure. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or DARE, aimed to teach elementary and middle school students "how to resist peer pressure and live productive drug- and violence-free lives." While it raised awareness and increased funding for anti-drug programs, DARE not only failed to significantly reduce drug use among teens, in some cases it actually increased it. The program promoted abstinence through willpower without addressing underlying reasons why kids use drugs: stress, trauma, social pressure, and curiosity, sounds a lot like some of the reasons they use social media too, right? Zero tolerance messaging discouraged honest conversations because kids knew they'd be punished if they got caught. And somehow, we think "just say no to phones" will be more effective than "just say no to drugs"?

I think part of the reason we adults gravitate toward these approaches is that they make us feel like we're doing something. The something is prescribed, it’s easy to understand, and it fits with the idea that we're in charge. But it doesn't fit with having an open, honest, trusting relationship with our kids. It doesn't fit with working to reduce shame in our relationship. It doesn't fit with avoiding the ruptures that happen when we punish kids for not complying with our rules. I'm not arguing that screen time and social media use specifically is completely benign, but for a lot of kids it really isn't that harmful. For a few kids, it is very harmful. And for other kids social media is an absolute lifeline, when their real-life communities don’t accept them. I know that blanket policies are appealing because parents worry that THEIR kid is going to be the one that has the big problem if we don’t ban social media. But what if you’re the parent of the kid who commits suicide because they couldn’t access communities that support them? I believe we need more nuanced approaches that allow us to respond to the child actually in front of us, rather than blanket policies that are going to end up hurting somebody’s child.

The big idea I want to work through on this topic is that when kids spend time on screens they aren't just moving towards screens. They're also moving away from something. Very often the thing they're moving away from is us. Because so many kids spend a lot of time with their peers, they become what Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Maté call 'oriented' to their peers, which essentially means they're attached to their peers rather than to us. And it might seem like cutting off their screen time and social media access is going to be the thing that brings them back to us, but what if it isn't? I'm going to read a passage from Neufeld and Maté's book Hold On To Your Kids, this book’s actually published before phones became really relevant but my audition was updated before the smart phone era. This section that I’m going to read is about a kid Melanie. Melanie was about 13 years old, her father could barely contain his anger when he talked about his daughter. Life with her changed after Melanie’s grandmother had died when the child was in the 6th grade until that time Melanie have been cooperative at home, a good student at school, a loving sister to her brother who was 3 years older, now she was missing classes and couldn’t care less about her homework. She was sneaking into the class on a regular basis, she refused to talk to her parents declaring she hated them. She just wanted to be left at home. She too refuses to eat with her parents consuming her meals all by herself in her room. The mother felt traumatized, she spent most of her time pleading with her daughter to be nice, to be home on time, and to stop sneaking out. The father could not abide Melanie’s insolent attitude. He believes the solution is somehow to lay down the law, to teach the adolescent a lesson she would never forget. As far as he was concerned anything less than a hard line approach is only indulging Melanie’s acceptable behavior and made matters worse. He was older more enraged since this until brought changes in the personality. Melanie had been Daddy’s girl, sweet and compliant.

So we get the initial description of Melanie, whom her Dad was willing to lavish love and attention on while she was sweet and compliant, and whom her mom wants to turn back into a nice girl who does what she's told. And the way they're going to do this is to lay down the law, because anything less than this would be impossible to consider. Ten pages later we hear a bit more about Melanie's story. First, we learn that peer orientation means a shift from having a magnetic pull between us and our child, and having that pull be between our child and their friends. We no longer feel the same warmth we did toward our child, and I'll read a bit more from the book here: Parenting involves hardship and we need something the burden a little easier to bear. Peer orientation changes all that, the body language and attachment they create magnetic pull is no longer directed towards us. The eyes no longer engage us, the face does not endear, the smiles that uses to warm our hearts have somehow frozen and now leave us cold or create an ache. Our child no longer response to our touch, embraces become perfunctory on sided who become difficult to like our child. We’re not primed by our child attachment to us; we are left to rely on our love and commitment to learn and on our responsibilities as parent which left us efficient for many it is not. For Melanie’s father it was not enough. Melanie had been close to him but when her attentions and affections were diverted to her peers, her father’s heart went cold. He was the kind of guy who went out of his way while beyond most parent in order to make something work for his daughter but it turned out to be more a work of attachment in his own autonomous character. His language reflected his change of heart, it was full of “I’ve had enough”, “I can’t take this anymore”. Nobody should have to put up this kind of shit, the ultimations also started flying. Melanie’s father felt used, abused, taken for granted, and taken advantage of.

I think it’s important to see that the so-called feelings that Neufeld tells us Melanie's parents are experiencing aren't really feelings. Used, abused, taken for granted, and taken advantage of, they are not feelings. They're judgments that put the blame for the situation on Melanie. Underneath those judgments, Melanie's Dad is probably experiencing confusion and hurt at the change in his relationship. That’s totally understandable. But he cannot conceive of what is happening for Melanie. Neufeld gave it away at the start of her story, everything changed after her grandmother died. What I hear in this story is a child who was struggling with grief. Perhaps she was a little short with her parents at times, and instead of wondering what was behind that, they punished her. So she withdrew, and was a little more short, and they punished her more. They got into a vicious cycle where her friends would accept her more than her parents and all her parents see is that this is Melanie's problem. They don't see that they have any role in this, and therefore punishing Melanie is the most appropriate strategy. But they don't see that they've been punishing her all along, and the only thing that has done is push Melanie further away from them. Somehow a kind of drastic ultimate hardline approach is supposed to bring her back to them. If you put yourself in Melanie's shoes, do you think it's likely to be effective?

Neufeld answers that question himself with an anecdote about another child, Lance, who transitioned from being unpopular to being part of the in-group when he was 11. Lance's parents felt uncomfortable with two friends in particular, especially when Lance started listening to their music that was violent and contained a lot of swear words. Lance began to be secretive with his parents, always demanding to be connected to those kids. His parents said: We decided we had to break out that relationship. We failed miserably; we sat Lance’s toned to have a talk with him. “You’re Dad and I no longer want you to see Josh”, I told him. He cried at first, he cried and cried and became clear, it felt we had forced him to make a decision between us and Josh and that he had chosen Josh. He cried because he would miss me, he didn’t speak to us. Three and a half months we got nothing at all. He continued to see Josh in school after school and on weekends. Finally, we had to give in. What Lance’s parents realized was that they could not confront the peer problem directly. They lacked the attachment power which is why their attempt to limit their son’s peer interaction was doomed to fail. They had to go back to basics and collect their son and woe him back to relationship with them.

The book doesn't say anything about what ultimately happened between Lance and his parents, and whether they were able to see that they were just as responsible for the situation as he was. Setting up phone bans seems easy enough, but you know your child is going to resist them. And what do you do then? Do you ground them? You've already taken away their phone; you're pretty quickly going to get to a point where there's nothing more to take away. I went through a phase of stealing when I was in my early teens. Never from stores, but I would steal money from my dad's change container, and when the collection plate came around at Sunday School, where we were each supposed to put 10 pence in to cover the cost of the materials we used, I would swirl my hand around in the coins and not put mine in. My Dad and my step mom responded by making me remove everything from my room. Everything that wasn't furniture or clothes or books that I needed for school went in boxes in the garage. Absolutely everything. I felt embarrassed, exposed, and ashamed that the evidence for what I'd done was so obvious for everyone to see, and I hated them for doing it. This wasn't the only incident like this that happened either. My Dad and my step-mom never ‘collected’ me. They never wooed me back into relationship with them. They couldn't see the pain I was carrying around with me, or my neurodivergence of course. All they saw was the behavior, and they punished the behavior. They didn't know how to help me figure out why I was acting the way I was, and I didn't know how to figure it out either. Their inability to really see me still shows up in my relationships today.

So I get why Twenge wants rules around screen time. I get why you might want rules around screen time. But if you don't think about where this might end up, you could very easily end up in a situation where setting rules on kids' behavior around screen time, with the goal of protecting them, only ends up pushing them further away from you. I know it isn't helpful to only tell you what not to do, so I've also created a set of scripts for you to use as guidelines to have conversations with your kids. I'm not generally a fan of scripts because pretty often the child in the script is super compliant and your child always ends up refusing to participate. So I scripted these with a reasonable dose of resistance from the child, and hopefully still help you find a path toward meeting both of your needs. There are versions for neurotypical teens, and neurotypical tweens with slightly less emotional awareness and the parent taking more of the lead in identifying solutions. There’s one for neurodivergent teens who are using content from neurodivergent creators to support themselves and also connecting with their communities in a way that's less stressful for them than connecting in-person, but still allows you to raise concerns about harmful content they may be coming across, and also one to help you with a child who is being impacted by social media in a serious way.

And because I know a lot of you prefer to listen rather than read, I had an online AI tool read the scripts for you in some admittedly kind of fake-sounding voices, so the tone won't be perfect but you'll get a sense for what you might say to your child without having to do a lot of reading and so those are available on my website on the page for this episode which you can find by going to yourparentingmojo.com/episodes and searching for Anxious Generation (part 4). They're scripted as a series of conversations rather than a one-and-done, because really there's no such thing as a one-and-done about screen time. You're either going to be having conversations about punishments when they break the rules on a regular basis, or about helping them to understand how media is affecting them and working together to moderate those influences. And we should also make offline experiences interesting for kids. We should provide them with places they can hang out and do activities they find interesting, and stop criminalizing parents who leave their kids unattended when there isn't neglect at play, and find ways for kids to be in leadership roles in their community. Maybe they can even get a job, or start their own business and set their own savings goals. When we were recording the welcome video for Carys' new online course helping kids to start their own businesses, I prepared a series of questions to ask her without telling her ahead of time what they were. One of those was: What is it you like most about running your own business? And I was pretty amused when her response was, “I like the responsibility - when you haven't been trusted with very much, and someone trusts you with the keys to their house, that means something.

Of course we've been trying to increase her responsibility for household chores and she's been resisting, and I had previously seen that she really appreciates being acknowledged. Even when she's doing a regular daily chore, I still make a point to thank her for doing it, just like I like to be thanked for cooking dinner each night, and I’ve seen that she’s been more willing to do things since I started doing that. I think parents worry that if their kids don't take responsibility around their own house, they'll never learn how to do it. Clearly Carys is learning how to take responsibility, and she doesn't have to learn that lesson within our walls. Her business has been more successful than we'd anticipated, and she has more than ten clients. And as a bonus that I hadn't anticipated, she's now spending less time on screens because she's out walking people's dogs instead. This brings us to the end of our four-part series on The Anxious Generation. In the first episode, we examined whether there's really a teen mental health crisis as dramatic as Dr. Haidt claims, and found the evidence far less convincing than the headlines – or the book itself - suggest. The increases in reported anxiety and depression among teens are real, but they're not the massive "surge of suffering" that would warrant the alarm bells that we're hearing.

In the second episode, we looked at whether screens and social media are causing the mental health problems we do see in some teens. Again, we found the research mixed at best. While heavy social media use does seem correlated with some mental health challenges for some teens, the causal relationship for every teen is far from clear, and the effects are much smaller than we're being told. In episode three we looked at phone bans in school and here we looked at phone bans at home and realized that things like bans, the strict rules, the more adult control might actually make things worse by addressing symptoms while ignoring the underlying needs that drive kids to their phones in the first place. The pattern that emerges across all four episodes that we’ve done is that we're desperately looking for simple answers to complex problems. We want to believe there's one clear cause (screens) with one clear solution (bans) because that feels manageable and gives us something concrete to do. But real life is messier than that. Kids today are dealing with academic pressure designed to sort them into winners and losers, social media platforms that we’ve engineered to exploit psychological vulnerabilities for profit, climate anxiety about an uncertain future, political divisiveness that adult’s model daily, and economic uncertainty about whether they'll ever be able to afford housing or continuing education. Some are also dealing with learning differences that go unrecognized, family stress, discrimination, trauma, and social isolation. Screens and social media might be one piece of this complex puzzle, but they're often also a coping mechanism for everything else kids are dealing with.

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. Where they can contribute to something bigger than themselves and see the impact of their choices. 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. They're the ones who believe their voices matter in shaping their own lives and their communities. You can't legislate that. You can't ban your way into it. It requires the much harder work of looking at our schools, our families, and our communities and asking: are we creating environments where young people can actually flourish? Are we giving them what they need to develop into healthy, well connected adults? The phone isn't the 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, and how we've built communities. The solution isn't in our children's pockets. It's in how we choose to see them, support them, trust them, and create space for them to grow. It isn’t phones that will dictate how our kids turn out. The thing that shapes our kids much more than that is our relationship with them. If we take away their phones and push them away from us at the same time, we’re not going to get where we want to go.

We have to listen to our kids, find out what they’re struggling with, support them in implementing their ideas to make things better, and see them as whole people who can make important decisions about their lives. That's a lot harder than taking away a phone. It's also more likely to actually work. As we wrap up this four-part series on "The Anxious Generation," let’s revisit the journey we’ve taken and distill the most important take-home messages for you. Episode 1 asked whether there truly is a teen mental health crisis as dramatic as headlines and some experts suggest. We found that while mental health challenges among teens are real, the scale and causes are far more nuanced than the “crisis” narrative implies. Much of the alarming data can be traced to changes in how we diagnose, code, and talk about mental health, rather than a sudden, universal collapse in teen wellbeing. We looked at how Haidt cherry picks data to make it seem like there’s universal harm happening around the world when actually he’s only showing the parts of the data that illustrate his point, and he’s shows it on graphs in a way that often makes the so-called crisis seem bigger than it really is. We also saw that even in an affluent, tightly-knit communities like Palo Alto, relentless academic and social pressure not social media can drive high rates of distress and even suicide.

Episode 2 explored whether social media is the main culprit behind any increases in anxiety and depression. The evidence here is mixed and very hotly debated. Many studies cited as “proof” that social media causes harm are riddled with methodological issues, such as demand effects and reliance on self-reported data. The best available research suggests that, while there are some teens for whom social media has a large impact, for most teens the direct impact of social media on mental health is small. The much larger influences on teen wellbeing are family relationships, economic security, sleep, academic pressure, and the quality of friendships. For some vulnerable youth, social media can be a source of harm, but for others especially LGBTQ+ youth or those in marginalized communities it can be a lifeline.

Episode 3 considered whether banning phones or returning to a “golden age” of childhood play is the answer to the perhaps-not-quite-as-bad-as-we’d-thought crises. We learned that nostalgic visions of free-range, unsupervised play often ignore the realities of the past and present: not all children had (or have) equal access to safe, supportive environments. Simply banning screens or enforcing play doesn’t address the underlying issues of pressure, exclusion, or lack of belonging. Instead, what seems most effective is creating environments at home, in schools, and in communities where children have agency, supportive relationships, and opportunities for meaningful, self-directed activity, with adults nearby to offer guidance when needed. And in this episode, we looked at whether banning phones in families by implementing strict rules actually improves children’s wellbeing. We said that while rules can sometimes reduce conflict or distraction in the short term, blanket bans often backfire damaging trust, undermining communication, and failing to address the underlying reasons why kids want to use their phones. Effective family phone policies are built through collaboration and open dialogue, not rigid enforcement. Instead of focusing solely on restrictions, I hope you’ll consider involving your kids in any rules around phone usage, model healthy device use yourselves, and address broader sources of stress and disconnection in your family life.

Here are the key ideas that I hope you’ll take from these set of episodes:

1. Avoid simple explanations and solutions.

Teen mental health is shaped by a complex web of factors. Social media is only a small part of the picture for most teens. Focusing solely on screens risks missing the bigger issues that may be driving their distress like academic pressure, family stress, and social exclusion, which can happen on social media but also very definitely happens off social media as well.

2. Prioritizing connection and communication.

Strong, supportive relationships with parents and other adults are among the most powerful protective factors for youth wellbeing. Make time for open-ended, non-judgmental conversations about your child’s experiences both related to what their doing online and offline. Try to listen more than you talk. Don’t rush to provide the answers. Support your kids in developing and implementing their own solutions to the problems that they face.

3. Collaborate, don’t just control.

Instead of imposing blanket bans or rigid rules, involve your child in setting healthy boundaries around technology. Help them reflect on how different activities make them feel, and encourage balance. Support them in developing their own internal compass for navigating digital life, by understanding what helps them and what doesn’t make them feel good. If you jump immediately to the solution of banning phones, your kids will never tell you that phones are a source of difficulty in their lives. But if you listen and ask them for their ideas on what they should do, and implement those ideas first, they’re going to be much more likely to want to work with you.

4. Address the real sources of pressure.

Be mindful of the expectations you set intentionally or unintentionally about grades, achievements, and “success.” Sometimes the kids that seem like they have it “together” are carrying the heaviest emotional loads. Talk with your kids about what success means to them, what support they need from you, and whether they’re getting enough rest. Make sure you’re pulling the biggest levers you can pull banning white teen girls in the U.S. from using social media is pulling a very small lever to try to effect changes in teens’ mental health. Making sure your kid supports LGBTQ teens in their school, and making sure young men have the support they need, would both be much bigger levers to pull.

5. Recognize diversity in needs and experiences.

What’s helpful for one child may not be for another. For some, social media is a source of stress; for others, it’s a crucial support. Consider your child’s unique context, temperament, and vulnerabilities when making decisions about technology and wellbeing. If your child seems to be very much impacted by social media, by all means talk with them about what you’re seeing and what help they want from you. And if your teen is using social media to cope with their real life, that’s important to know too, and you’ll need a different set of strategies to support them.

To summarize: the challenges facing kids today are real, but they are not new and they are not caused by any single factor, whether it’s social media, or screen time, or anything else. The most effective way to support your child’s mental health is to build strong relationships, foster open communication with them, and create environments where they feel seen, heard, and valued. Rather than fighting the latest tech panic, let’s focus on helping our children develop the skills and sense of belonging that they need both online and offline to thrive in a complex world. Thanks for joining me on this deep dive into The Anxious Generation. I hope you’ve found it helpful in sorting out what we know from what we’re just guessing about, and making choices to support both YOUR kids, and everyone else’s kids as well, in thriving.

I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this. Just go to the episode page that Jen mentioned. Thanks for listening.