What we're getting wrong about teens and tech | Candice Odgers | Your Body on Tech

Summary

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TED Talks Daily - Podcast Summary

Episode: What we're getting wrong about teens and tech | Candice Odgers | Your Body on Tech
Date: June 23, 2026
Host: Minouche Zamorodi
Guest: Dr. Candice Odgers, Developmental Psychologist, UC Irvine

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Episode Overview

This episode challenges widely held assumptions about the negative impact of technology and social media on teen mental health. Developmental psychologist Dr. Candice Odgers shares her research and direct observations over 25 years, revealing that the real drivers of youth well-being often lie outside of technology. The conversation addresses moral panics, policy missteps, and what adults can do to truly support teens in their digital and offline lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Cultural Narrative versus the Science

• "Teenagers today are amazing."
  Candice starts by subverting expectations, stating that teens are actually thriving in many metrics, despite the usual adult anxieties about youth culture and technology. (05:29, Odgers)
• The stories told about teens suffering due to smartphones and social media are not substantiated by research data or teen self-reports.
• Scary narratives "sell" easily to anxious parents but are not always true.

  “The more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it’s true. And scary stories are really easy to sell to parents. We are an anxious lot.” (06:31, Odgers)

What the Data Shows about Teens and Technology

• Longitudinal studies show no major correlation between social media use and negative teen mental health outcomes.
  • For boys: no association.
  • For girls: those already struggling may use social media more, but the reverse (social use causing struggles) is not supported.
  • Notable Quote:

    “In our longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health. Many others find the same, concluding that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health.” (01:12 & 10:00, Odgers)

• Adult mental health and caregiver well-being are the strongest predictors of adolescent well-being.
  • Between 2011–2021, parental distress (including drug overdose deaths) doubled—a likely contributor to rising youth distress.

Adult Moral Panic and Policy Reactions

• The panic about screens follows an older pattern: from video games, to screens generally, to social media, and now AI.
• Banning social media or phones is becoming popular policy, but no existing evidence supports a ban improving mental health or learning.
  • When bans are enacted (e.g., in Australia), they often backfire—removing parental controls, driving kids to less safe online spaces, or introducing privacy invasions (e.g., facial recognition).
• Policy paradox:

  “A social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me—and I believe them—it's not going to work. It'll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces, and will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them to be well.” (13:14, Odgers)

What Teens Are Really Doing Online

• Most use is for music, consuming content, connecting with friends, or boredom relief.
  • Social media is “the new television”—most content is parasocial, with real interactions happening in smaller, private chats.
• Teens use digital platforms for peer support and information, often more adeptly than adults realize.
  • “They are actually better in so many ways at silencing notifications, curating their own feeds... They also think we’re terrible at it, and they’re probably not wrong.” (55:19, Odgers)

The Real Drivers of Teen Mental Health Trends

• Major wins: Teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy rates at historic lows; highest graduation rates ever; increased empathy and activism.
• Reports of increased youth anxiety, sadness, and suicidal risk are real—but these trends mirror a broader adult mental health crisis.
• Major stressors for teens: Family conflict and academic pressure, not primarily technology.

The Flaws and Harms of Simple Tech Bans

• Bans on tech often:
  • Remove structured and safer accounts/settings.
  • Increase surveillance and privacy risks for all users.
  • Disproportionately affect marginalized youth (increased suspensions, as seen in Florida).
  • Create an opportunity cost—huge investments in controlling tech rather than funding counselors, teachers, community spaces, or recess time.

What Actually Helps: Evidence-Based Recommendations

1. Invest in adult mental health and support networks for kids.
   • Counselor-to-student ratios are abysmal (1:500 in US middle schools).
2. Build inclusive, well-resourced spaces (online and offline) for all youth.
   • Digital mental health services, drop-in centers, afterschool programs.
3. Strengthen digital literacy—not fear-based bans.
4. Hold tech companies accountable through smart regulation—not blanket bans.
   • “Bans don’t do that. They let companies off the hook. Instead, we need to fund teachers… and deliver effective digital mental health services and digital literacy programs…” (16:36, Odgers)
5. Remind teens they can talk—without fear of losing tech.
   • Odgers: “Have the conversation that if something bad or scary or upsetting happens here, I want you to talk to me about it. And if you do, I will never shut this off or take it away for doing that.” (54:24, Odgers)

Shifting Approach with AI and Emerging Technologies

• History suggests bans will fail; regulation and proactive education in AI will be essential.
• Risks: Amplification of inequalities if access and training aren’t equitably distributed.
• Opportunity: Tools like AI can help with personalized education, especially in the global south.

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Notable & Memorable Quotes

• On adult panic:

  “There is a massive gap. And as I've tried to make sense of this gap, I keep coming back to a simple truth that we all know. Scary stories sell.” (06:31, Odgers)

• On policy missteps:

  “Instead of cleaning up the online world… we are punishing victims. We’re kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends… We’ve already kicked teenagers out of public spaces in the US. And now we're telling our kids we're going to take away the spaces they go to virtually gather and create community because adults broke that too.” (13:14, Odgers)

• On bans:

  “Putting all of our hopes and prayers in banning is going to backfire. It can actually make things worse.” (42:29, Odgers)

• On resilience:

  “This generation is not lost or destroyed. They are resilient… If we want to help them to continue to succeed, we need to set high expectations and then support them in getting there. This is the magic combination that has always worked in teaching, in coaching, in parenting… Tech has not changed that.” (15:10, Odgers)

• On the true “addiction” narrative:

  “The addiction frame is kind of a whole other really big problem right now in terms of how we're thinking about this. You're using that word like a diagnosis to describe behavior that's very normative and to tell young people that they're addicted… when it's clearly not in the clinical sense.” (42:20, Odgers)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:29]—Start of Dr. Odgers’ main TED talk: “Teenagers today are amazing.”
• [10:00]—Data on stressors, suicide risk, parental distress; no major link to tech.
• [12:35]—Studies find social media a minor predictor; bans have no proven benefit.
• [16:36]—What would actually help: Investment in adults, community spaces, and smart tech regulation.
• [19:40]—Personal background: From vulnerable youth advocacy to studying screens.
• [23:35]—How the moral panic focus has shifted: from video games, to screens, to social media, to AI.
• [28:01]—What teens are actually doing online (“the new television,” support, chats).
• [29:29]—Reviewing the reality of a “teen mental health crisis” (yes, some concerns, but the context is crucial).
• [33:31]—On misleading data visualizations and policy temptations.
• [41:27]—Why bans give adults a false sense of control and are popular but problematic.
• [43:25]—Australia’s social media ban: unintended negative consequences.
• [46:44]—Real impacts of phone bans in US schools (e.g., discipline disparities).
• [49:17]—AI as the next challenge, and the dangers of new policy shortcuts.
• [54:24]—Parenting advice: how to respond when a 12-year-old wants to join Snapchat.
• [55:19]—Why listening to young people is critical—they’re often wiser digitally.
• [57:01]—Conclusion: Nuance is needed, not fear.

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Teens are not universally “broken” by tech; the crises we see in young people must be understood in the context of broader adult malaise, economic instability, systemic pressures, and policy missteps.
• Punitive or fear-driven tech bans not only fail to solve underlying issues, they frequently create new harms—by removing safer spaces, enabling surveillance, and misdirecting resources.
• Real support comes from investing in adults around youth, building vibrant and equitable support systems, and addressing digital risks via regulation and education, not bans.
• Listeners are encouraged to approach the tech and teen debate with openness, evidence, and a willingness to listen to what young people are actually telling us.

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In the Speakers’ Own Language & Tone

Odgers is clear, forthright, sometimes wry—“Did I mention that I'm Canadian and I do not mind taxing the rich?”—and consistently non-alarmist, calling for curiosity, nuance, and evidence over panic. The episode is ultimately hopeful:

“If your teen is generally doing okay, you don't have to be quite so terrified if they're spending some time online. Take a deep breath. Kids are amazing.” (57:01, Zamorodi)

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Transcript

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. Hello, I am Minouche Zamorodi. I'm a journalist, an author, a two time TED speaker. I also host NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast. And this week I'm taking over for Elise Hu with a special series of episodes all about how you can live a healthier life in our high tech era. So this past April, I curated a session at TED 2026 full of speakers whose work will make you think differently about your body, your technology, and what is keeping us human in this digital age. Every day this week you're going to hear one of these talks and then a deeper conversation that I had with these incredible speakers. Really, they are incredible. Today we're talking about the relationship between kids, screenshots and social media. It's a fraught topic. Most of us have heard how harmful tech can be for kids and their mental health. But child psychologist Candace Odgers says that much of what we've been told is not based on solid science.

[Candace Odgers]

In our longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health. Many others find the same concluding, and I'm going to quote, that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Candice researches teens and screens at UC Irvine. She has spent years interviewing them and tracking them, with their permission, of course, seeing what they do on their phones and in their daily lives. And I came across her work when I was trying to learn more about how we could be most effective in coaching kids to use their devices responsibly and spend less time on them. But the more I dug into Candace's work, the more I started to wonder if we should be looking less at the tech and more at everything else the kids are dealing with. It's a difficult idea to wrap your head around. Maybe parts of social media are awful and it is harmful for certain teens, but on the whole, maybe social media isn't damaging a generation.

[Candace Odgers]

And why do we even think that scary stories sell?

They always have. And scary stories are really easy to sell to parents. We are an anxious lot and the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Candice odgers talk and our fascinating conversation is coming up right after a short break.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

And now, our TED Talk and conversation of the day.

[Candace Odgers]

Teenagers today are amazing.

You didn't think I was going to use that word?

Because as we age, our adult brains have a harder time making this teenager equals amazing connection. I've always worried that I'D reach the age where I'd look back and immediately judge the youth of today for what they wear, right? How they spend their time, lament the loss of my free range childhood, and wish that they would spend more of their time doing things that we did, like crash our cars and excessively drink.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right?

[Candace Odgers]

True story. But I'm beginning to think that I'm immune from judging teenagers in this way. And I think it's because I now know too much about them. So let me explain. I'm a developmental psychologist and for the past 25 years.

That's a long time.

I've been analyzing trends in teen mental health. Since 2008, we've been working with thousands of 10 to 14 year olds getting information every day from their phones on how they're feeling, how they spend their time, who they're with. With their consent, we look at their school records, we track their sleep data, we look at their step count and we see what they're doing online. Importantly, we listen to them about what upsets them and what they need to be. Well, it has been a really incredible and at times wild ride. It's also been an illuminating one because one of the most consistent things we have found is that the stories that you and I are told repeatedly every day about teenagers today, that they are lost, that they are worse off than ever, that somehow smartphones and social media have destroyed them and their brains, it doesn't match the data and it doesn't match what they tell us. There is a massive gap. And as I've tried to make sense of this gap, I keep coming back to a simple truth that we all know. Scary stories tell. They always have. And the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true. I'm going to say it again. The more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true. Right? And scary stories are really easy to sell to parents. We are an anxious lot. The hypervigilance it hits us when we hold that tiny baby in our arms, our entire world changes. It hits again when they hit puberty and they begin to change in these dramatic and rapid ways. When our sense of control over them and what comes next begins to feel less certain. I get this. My 15 year old is 6 foot 4. My 12 year old is embracing independence like she's leaving for college next week. But the good news is, is that the real story about teens today is far more positive and far less frightening than the stories we all read. They have made remarkable progress on metrics that really matter. And we know a lot about how to keep them happy, safe and well. Okay, the bad news, the bad news is we are in the middle of an adult mental health crisis. And caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of teen mental health by far. So if we are concerned about teens today, we need to invest in real and meaningful ways in the adults around them. Many of them are simply not. Okay, so I'll come back to that, but first I want to share with you a few science based facts about kids today. And I'm going to focus on American teens because that's where a lot of the stories that you and I are hearing come from. So in the past 20 years, we've had some major wins. Rates of teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy have plummeted to historic lows. You are looking at the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation. Young people are inventors, they're activists, they're leaders, they're amazing singers, they are Olympians, they're amazing. But they're also telling us that they're sadder and they're more worried about the

world that they're growing up in.

So they report increased concerns about safety at school, climate change, racism, their future. In our studies, what we find is the most frequently reported stressors are conflict in their home and pressure to do well at school. And those are also the things that predict their mental health day to day. Now, since 2008, we've seen an uptick in youth suicide risk, but perhaps this shouldn't be surprising because adult suicide has been increasing dramatically in the United States since 1999. Remember when I said that adult mental health and caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of child mental health? Between 2011 and 2021, the rate of overdoses due to drug use among parents more than doubled. People ask me all the time what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online. The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying. Okay, let's go back to that elephant in the room. Social media and smartphones also increased during this period. But here's the weird thing. In our longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health. Many others find the same. Concluding, and I'm going to quote, that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health. For most adolescents, like boys, there's no association. And for girls, what we find is that girls that are depressed go on to use social media more. But not the other way around. Social media does not meaningfully predict future mental health problems. Now, despite this, adults are quickly converging on banning social media for under 16s as a simple and singular solution to solving the youth mental health crisis. And here is the crazy part. There's not one single study to date that has actually tested whether shutting it off impacts their mental health. And when we do this among adults, we find on average impacts that are close to or indistinguishable from zero. I know there's a big distance between the story we're told and the data. The National Academies of Sciences, one of the most well respected organizations in the world, convened an expert panel and they

came to this conclusion also.

Okay, so before you start throwing stuff at me, I want to clarify a few things. I'm not saying there are no harms online. I'm not saying big tech does not require massive overhaul. Both things can be true. We need to clean up the online world for everyone, and especially our children. And social media is not the major driver of teen mental health problems for most adolescents today. But instead of cleaning up the online world and prosecuting perpetrators of online harm,

regardless of the office or the position

in society that they hold, we, we are punishing victims. We're kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming them offline. We've already kicked teenagers out of public spaces in the US We've created a society where firearms are the number one killer of our children. And now we're telling our kids that we're going to take away the spaces that they're going to virtually gather and create community because adults broke that too. Yeah, I'm saying adults broke the Internet and they're trying to fix it by kicking kids off. So a social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe them, it's not going to work. It'll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them to be well. So if a social media ban might make things worse, what would make things better? So first we need to invest in the adults around children. Did you know that the ratio of counselors to students in US middle schools is 1 to 500? Spending millions of dollars on yonder pouches to lock up kids phones is not going to solve that. We need to take that money. We need to hire teachers, we need to hire counselors, and we need to pay them well. Building a healthy human requires investment in children and the adults around them, full stop. Second, we need to build spaces that are welcoming and safe for all teens to build the skills they need for the future. So my colleague Stephen Schuller spends his days designing digital mental health services for communities in rural communities and opening up youth drop in centers across the state of California for young people who need it. We know young people are more likely to go online when they're anxious and depressed. We need to be there to build the services and supports that they need instead of just focusing on taking things away. And three, please do not believe everything that you hear about young people today. A favorite pastime of adults has been shaming young people. But this generation is not lost or destroyed. They are resilient. They are resilient because they are succeeding despite the suffering of adults around them. And if we want to help them to continue to succeed, we need to set high expectations and then we need to support them in getting them there. This is the magic combination that has always worked in teaching, in coaching, in parenting. It still works with teens today. Tech has not changed that. And finally, just so you believe me, I'm going to say it again. Big tech does not get a pass. This cannot fall to parents and teachers. We require more regulation. But bans don't do that. They let companies off the hook. Instead, we need to fund teachers. We need to build communities and spaces for children and teenagers to play and to learn. And we need to deliver effective digital mental health services and digital literacy programs to young people where and when they need them. And we're going to pay for all of this with a big old tax on tech, right? Did I mention that I'm Canadian and I do not mind taxing the rich?

So.

But if our goal is to support young people, and I assume that we all share that, then we will fail if all we do is focus on tech and taking things away. If all we see when we look at our kids is their phone, we're going to fail seeing what they really need from us. Thank you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was UC Irvine professor of psychology Candace Odgers. We're going to take a quick break. Don't go away because I will be right back with my spicy and scientific conversation with Candace about how she's trying to get a new message out there about teens and what they really need to improve their mental health. I'll see you in a sec.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

Were you always interested in the development of kids and their brains and their feelings and all those things, or was that something that came to you later in your career?

[Candace Odgers]

So I actually started my career working with sexually exploited youth in Vancouver, kids who had been displaced from families and homes and showing up in the courthouse and making sure that they knew why they were charged with the crimes that they had been charged or the infractions, and then trying to understand who was going to show up to speak up for them. And one of the things I quickly realized was that the biggest predictor of whether a child was put into custody versus taken home or taken out of that courtroom was whether a caring adult showed up in the courtroom. So I made it my purpose to track down the adults in these young people's lives.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And then when did sort of screens and technology come onto the scene and become your focus? How did that happen?

[Candace Odgers]

That's a great question. So I've worked and studied around the world and worked on a number of longitudinal studies, and these are studies that follow children from sometimes birth into adulthood and measure multiple dimensions of their mental health. What you typically do is you measure cognition, education, mental health, sleep, family dynamics, but you're only able to see the children and the families, usually once a year, once every couple of years, to understand, you know, what are the early predictors of mental health problems. And so you discover right away that that kind of assessment, it just misses a lot. Right. So we wanted to get some higher resolution measurement of what was happening in the lives of kids. They might predict their mental health, they might get better measurement of what was happening. So in about 2008, I wrote my first grant that was funded by the William T. Grant foundation, which was essentially using mobile phones to get better information on children's daily lives. And so I wasn't specifically interested in the digital world at that time. I was interested in the settings where young people grow and develop. And we were using mobile phones as a better way to measure those settings. And it's one of the reasons I started to get interested in the effects of tech, because we were bringing at that point young people into the lab who we'd recruited from schools and communities, and we were setting them up with mobile devices to get them to report on what they were doing and how they're spending their time. And parents had a ton of questions for us about what, you know, the kinds of things we're still asking today. So what's the age at which my child should be given a phone? Are children losing their communication skills? Is this harmful for them to be spending time online? And so I set out with one, one of my graduate students at the time, Matty George, to review all of the surveys of parents and all of the research we knew on the effects of digital media on children's development. And we were really shocked because what we found was that there wasn't this overly negative story in the research at that time. So we started to add questions, this is now almost 20 years ago, about what young people were doing online. And so we started to add these measures of children's digital experiences alongside all the other things that we typically measure, which is stress and social school and family conflict and how much exercise they're getting in a day, for example.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah, we have to remember 20 years ago, the iPhone wasn't even out. It came out in 2007. And social media wasn't really big. And so you were really using technology as a tool. You were not studying technology's effect on kids necessarily, or just starting to. Do I have that right?

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah. But what turned out is we had a front row seat to the rise of it.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Candace Odgers]

Everyone's talking about this period of time, but, you know, we were sitting there on teenagers phones and talking to them about digital technology as it rolled out. And so that was a bit of a unique vantage point.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So what did you see starting to happen? Take us through the conversation that was going on in the culture versus what you were observing.

[Candace Odgers]

So at that time, we were really ending our panic over video games, right? And so we had just lived through the Columbine school shootings. School shootings were increasing. All the panic in that moment was around violence and video games. So they were commissioning panels to try and understand, you know, is it that time online or time with these first shooter games is leading to increases in violence. And so the focus was really on video games at that time. And then it shifted, right? And then it was screens in general. So what are screens and screen time doing to our children? And there was this Atlantic article by a psychologist named Jean Twenge that asked this question, have smartphones destroyed a generation? And everybody quickly said, yes, right? Yes, they have. And that set off a whole debate about whether screen time was associated with poor outcomes. And we had all of these debates in the literature and data that essentially showed there's this tiny correlation we find is less than 1% of the variation. And it's the same correlation you find if you look in these same data sets and look at whether you wear glasses or you eat potato chips or you are left handed. And so that was really where we were stuck in the screen time debate for a while. Well, it's not just screen time, it's social media and it's, oh, well, it's not just social media. It's social media among girls and it's depression. And so the conversation really narrowed and we became laser focused on young girls and social media as the primary culprit. So we kind of moved our target. And, you know, now our new target is artificial intelligence and conversational agents. And so the new tech will continue to evolve and that will continue to be the new target of kind of our ire as parents and policymakers.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, I think there will be some people who hear you saying that this was essentially a moral panic or that people were freaking out and maybe unnecessarily and they might think, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? I thought this had been decided. Social media, too much screen time for kids. Bad, really bad. But that is what you are pushing against.

[Candace Odgers]

So that's the story that we're repeatedly told. And I'm not saying that this is all a moral panic. And so I've actually argued for a long time that tech companies need to do A better job with all kinds of things and designing platforms for all of us, including our children. But what has been really shocking to me as I've stood here and kind of watched this debate unfold and seen how things are translated to the broader public, is that there's just this massive gap, and it really is massive, between what evidence has been generated to date and rigorous studies have found and expert panels have concluded, which is essentially that there's very tiny correlations between social media and mental health, and that when we find them, it often is potentially a reverse direction, where young people who are feeling bad to begin with or experiencing some problems go on to use more social media, but not vice versa. Our experimental research is telling us that when we do trials and we tell people or ask people to give up social media, we randomly assign them and then we follow them up to ask how they've done. That's not ideal, anyway. We're kind of biased towards finding an effect there. But in those studies, we're seeing that, on average, the effects are zero or close to zero. The smartphone ban studies are now coming out and showing us that the effects on things like learning and attendance and bullying are zero or close to zero.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And so you're talking about bans in schools.

[Candace Odgers]

In schools. So, yeah, but I think it's interesting. I'm not saying there are no harms. What I am saying is that the story that we're repeatedly told as parents and policymakers and people that are invested and young people themselves are told this story that social media is universally harmful to, that it is damaging brains.

Right.

That is leading to an epidemic of mental health problems that simply isn't supported by the data. And so this gap is really puzzling. And so this is a really interesting thing for me, as adults make all these assumptions about what young people are doing online, what they're seeing, why they're there, and those assumptions are based on their own use, and adult use is not great. We're not great at this, and our mental health is not great. So a lot of the assumptions we make about young people and what they're doing online are just. They're just wrong.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So what are they doing online, Candace? I'm kind of dying to know.

[Candace Odgers]

Well, they're doing a lot of things. I mean, the biggest thing they're doing is listening to music and consuming content. Right. Social media is actually the new television. It's not actually social media like we thought of it before. It's very parasocial. Right. And so most of the content is built by Big influencer reports. And the action among kids is really in these side group chats or discord. And that's where all the interaction happens, right on these platforms where they have these smaller groups, usually people that they know offline, and they're pulling in content from online or social media, from youth culture and sharing it there. But they're not out there creating a ton of the content that's online. They are creating some. So they're going there to like, find out information, connect with friends, reduce boredom, sometimes to find help for mental health problems, seek support. We're seeing a lot of support seeking now, especially with conversational agents. And so many of the reasons they go online are the reasons that they connect with people in the offline world too.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, so let's put that aside, what teens are doing on their screens and how much time they're spending on those screens and just talk about the other issue, which is the majority of us have heard and believe that there is a mental health crisis among teenagers in the United States. Let's leave other countries out of this for now. Is that true?

[Candace Odgers]

So that's a, that's a great question. It's going to be, and it's complicated answer. I know that's what academics always give. But the good news is that the things I started my career really focused on things like substance use. So alcohol use, violence, educational dropout, those things have plummeted. Right. And so we have, and this has been going on for about 20 years, the lowest rates of alcohol use, of teen pregnancy. We have the most educated generation in terms of high school graduation. And it's interesting on almost every metric that you can measure, so if you think about intelligence or empathy, other types of characteristics, kids today actually look pretty good and they look better than we did. And so there's a lot of shaming of young people both about their mental health and about things like intelligence or narcissism or empathy. And it's just simply not the case that they're worse than us. And it's simply not the case that we're in a crisis. Now I'm going to get to the part where I am concerned. While we've seen these improvements in externalizing behaviors, we've seen young people reporting that they're more anxious about the world that they live in, that they're sadder than they have been previously. They report all kinds of concerns in those spaces. And, you know, in the United States since 2008, so right after the Great Recession, we've seen an uptick in youth Suicide. And this probably shouldn't be surprising because since 1999, suicide among adults in this country has been increasing, and so it's leveled off recently. But we have just seen adults in the United States in pretty serious distress.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So you're saying that. Yes, their suicide deaths among young people increased pretty dramatically from like, 2007 to 2021, I believe you're saying. You can't really say that without acknowledging that the same thing was happening for adults during this period.

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah.

So one of the things that's very clear is that adult mental health and parental mental health is the biggest, and I will say, like the largest predictor of children's mental health. And so we've seen adults in crisis in this country for quite some time, and it got amplified after the Great Recession. There's a new study that came out in Jama and essentially shows that between 2011 and 2021, we've seen a doubling of deaths among parents due to firearms and drug overdoses. And those are extreme outcomes and are really the tip of the iceberg in terms of thinking about the kind of distress and issues that adults today are dealing with. And so when we look at that period and people say, well, social media increases, what else could possibly be happening? We have to have a discussion about adult mental health. We can't see the whole picture without understanding the suffering of adults around young people.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You've mentioned the economic crisis. So you're talking about adults losing their jobs, feeling financial, real worries about that, rises in addictions, overdoses, loss of healthcare, where they maybe would have prevented or treated an illness. They've let it go for a long time. Then we got a pandemic. Throw that in there. Am I missing anything?

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah, a lot has been happening.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Candace Odgers]

And we've seen an increase in school shootings. Right. During this time as well. We've seen a lot of kind of movements. We've seen a change in the demographics of U.S. adolescents. So now in California and Texas, for example, 70% of students in high school actually identify with a group that has been traditionally minoritized or discriminated against. And we know that that matters for daily health. And so there's. There's a lot of factors. And saying it's a lot of factors doesn't sell a story easily. Right. It's easier to say it's social media and it's smartphones and to shut that off. But when you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Jonathan Haidt at New York University, whose book the Anxious Generation, with the subtitle how the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Like, he has lots of graphs and, you know, to some person flipping through the book, like, mapping the rise in suicides and depression and anxiety in young people with the rise in use of social media and smartphones. I mean, it's compelling, Candace. Like, oh, look, we can see why this is happening, so we can fix it.

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah, I think it is simple to scare people with statistics. And, you know, I'm a quantitative psychologist as well, and I teach graduate statistics, and we can draw a lot of scary, scary graphs. And that happens. Unfortunately, that happens in the media every day. And whenever I see one of these graphs, what I do is I do the thing where I expand the axes and say, what's really happening? And then I go back to the original source, and it is stunning how many times these lines are cherry picked or manipulated. We saw it actually this week in the Financial Times. There was a big graph, and they said, since the inception of the smartphone, birth rates have declined around the world. Right. And so it was also birth rates did decline after the Great Recession because

[Minouche Zamorodi]

children didn't have any money.

[Candace Odgers]

Right. There's the money thing. But the whole focus was on smartphones. And so people now can use AI and take a picture of that graph and go back and check it against the original data, and it looks like it was cooked. There is so much incentive right now to sell these scary stories about our young people because it sells. And we just did a survey of California voters, and the only thing that Democrats and Republicans and independents agreed on was that they wanted to ban smartphones in schools and they wanted to get kids off of social media. There are no differences between Democrats, independents, and Republicans on that issue in America today, which is incredible. So if you were running for office, this is an easy thing to target. Children don't vote. They're an easy group to push aside and to tell stories about. It's a political win. Now, this isn't to discount the harm.

Yeah. Because that's what I'm gonna ask you. Yeah.

Or to advocate for big tech. I mean. No, no, no, no. But what we're doing is we're actually giving them a pass. When we go right to a ban, we're allowing them to say that young people are no longer on the platform and we can see. I mean, we get data streaming from their phones. We know where they are, they are on the platforms, and so it gives them a pass. And it means that they don't have to clean up and fix these fundamental issues with the digital ecosystem. Right, where adults have really broken the Internet and now we're just going to kick kids off and say that the problem is solved.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Everyone agrees that tech companies take advantage of human behavior for their own quarterly earnings report. They allow dangerous people into online communities. They allow false information to flourish. They take little responsibility for safety on their platforms. We clearly need regulations and standards so that we get more of the good parts of being online and less of the bad. So I guess part of what I hear from people is like, well, nothing else is working. So what's the harm in using kids as a way to start to put pressure on tech companies, those companies, their parents too, that work at those places. We have to ring an alarm bell that's loud enough to actually make a change. And why would it be bad if this is the way we do it?

[Candace Odgers]

I have thought about this a lot and one of the parallels I draw is that if someone was going around and saying purple dye is the cause of pediatric cancer, I would want a pediatric oncologist to stand up and say, actually, it's not the main cause of childhood cancer. I mean, these are serious issues. Childhood depression, anxiety. Depression is one of the leading causes of disability in the world.

Right?

And so we need to have a clear eyed view on what the causes of that are and what we can do that can actually help prevent mental health problems early on. Because it has always been the case that the first signs of mental health problems emerge in early adolescence. And that was true long before smartphones and social media came on. So we have this window of opportunity and we need to use it. But instead, if we allow ourselves to tell a story that social media or time online damages children's brains, we are sending messages that are not based on evidence that are shaming our young people and that are really allowing us to bypass the harder work that has to be done in order to actually support young people and address mental health issues.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

We're going to take a quick break. We will be right back.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

So at this point, one might be listening and thinking, okay, well fine, what do you want me to do as a parent, as someone who cares about young people, at least with getting phones out of schools or banning kids from social media, these are clear, concrete rules that like nobody has to be the most amazing parent. You know, like, yeah, sure, I'd love to have deep conversations with my kids, but maybe that's not happening.

[Candace Odgers]

So we know that the bands are coming, that they're hugely popular, and those are really normative and value based judgments. I mean, adults and parents want their kids on technology less. They don't trust tech companies with this, right? So they want a different reality for the young people in their lives and that I am not here to tell anybody how much screen time their child should have or how they should make these decisions in terms of what they want kind of normatively but if you are doing this from a position of fear and you're being told that you should do this because social media causes all of these things, for example, you know, that's a message that's not supported by the science. I wouldn't make them from a place of fear where your child is going to fall into, or that they're going

[Minouche Zamorodi]

to get addicted, like, if they start smoking cigarettes.

[Candace Odgers]

Yes. So the addiction frame is kind of a whole other really big problem right now in terms of how we're thinking about this.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You're using that word like a diagnosis

[Candace Odgers]

to describe behavior that's very normative and to tell young people that they're addicted to this and to frame it in that way when it's clearly not in the clinical sense that we would use it. But, you know, I think you're right. It's a tough, tough spot for parents to be in who want something different and don't know how to get there. But I do think that putting all of our hopes and prayers in banning is going to backfire. Right. And it can actually make things worse. So it can push young people into less safe and less regulated spaces. It can take pressure off companies to make the online world better for everyone. And we just know, I mean, if we step back and think about this at all, we know that banning youth from online spaces is not going to work. And we're seeing that play out in Australia right now. Right.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So what has happened there? They got kids under 16 allegedly can't go on social media, and then they started tracking what actually happened.

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah. So Australia was the first country in the world to ban social media for under 16. You know, they rushed it through after a year, actually, after one of the wives of a politician read the Anxious Generation, and this all went through very quickly. And then in December 2025, when platforms kicked kids off, what happened is that all the under 16 still had access to YouTube, for example, and it's the number one platform that the children and youth are on. But what they had lost were their accounts, which had parental controls, content moderations and filters. And so on day one of the ban, you just made a situation worse. You took all of the safety protocols that were in place based on the accounts, and you threw them out. And like, I was previously a professor in a policy school, and that's really impressive. Like, usually you have to do two or three steps after the policy to see where things go wrong or where there's iatrogenic effects. But here, kind of on day one, and then after that They've been following young people and to see what they actually do. And it turns out the vast majority, so over 70% are still on the platforms, others are probably in less regulated spaces. They decided that what you have to do is you have to violate the privacy rights of everybody to figure out who's 16 or not. So it's not just the kids that have to upload their data, it's all the adults. So now we're saying let's give all of our data over to these companies that have shown that they're not very good at not monetizing it and they're not able to protect it or not motivated to do that. And so we do that. And then they had the idea that they would use facial recognition, right. So facial recognition to predict how old somebody is. And so we both, you know, have teenagers and they went through middle school. So can you imagine trying to go into a middle school and predict whether a 13 year old is 11 versus

[Minouche Zamorodi]

so some look like they're 25.

[Candace Odgers]

So yeah. Right. So there are many problems that computer vision can solve and this is just not one of them. So it turns out like the, they're like one or two. They're probably about two years off. They do worse with children from a minority background. And then you can bypass telling my

[Minouche Zamorodi]

kids to hand over their face to these companies. Wait, haven't I been spending the last 10 years telling them not to do that?

[Candace Odgers]

Well, the next thing is Meta is going to do it with bone stuff structure. Now, like that's a great idea, isn't it? So it's leading to all of these more invasive surveillance issues for us and for our kids. And so I don't think this is the path. It's also, you know, there's kids that took pictures of their dogs and pictures, you know, they drew a mustache on their face and that works. So it's clear that the companies are not actually trying that hard to stop this because those are, those are problems that computer vision can solve. So, you know, you follow it through. There's no changes in bullet in online bullying after this happens so far. And again, I don't want to, I guess I should pull back and say that I don't think any one study is definitive and there's going to be people on kind of both sides of this when the early evidence comes out that either declare victory or declare failure. I do think we've had some really sobering looks that should cause us to really pause and say, is this how we want to be spending all of our policy effort, time money is chasing these companies when there are very real threats and issues and resources we could be directing towards young people.

Yeah.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

One of the things I've been thinking about is how many states have passed laws getting phones out of schools, and yet so few states have laws that require recess or any outdoor time during the school day.

[Candace Odgers]

But yet we're spending millions of dollars. In fact, I was called in to my child's middle school last week because the yonder lady had chased her in. She gave me permission to share this. The yonder lady had chased her into the bathroom.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

The yonder, for people who don't know, is the little pouches that kids put their phones in when they get to school that supposedly locks it up for the day.

[Candace Odgers]

Yes, they lock them up for the day. And if we went to any middle school in America right now, what you would find in those pouches are old phones and in my child's case, a calculator, which she needed for her math test, which is the part that really. But I was called into the office because she evoked her Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

But.

[Candace Odgers]

But, you know, I say that I love your. I know I say this jokingly, but this is actually one of the impacts of the ban. So in Florida, what they found was immediately after the bans went up, suspensions went up. And in Florida, it was against black and brown students. And so we know being suspended from school and having that on your record is not a great thing for a child. So what are we doing? We're spending millions of dollars on these pouches for kids to lock up their calculators, hiring people to enforce these.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

How do you respond, though, to people who say, well, the teachers love it. There is a line drawn that you cannot have your phones out and kids aren't subjected to fomo. You know that these companies know how to manipulate them to get them to want to look at their phones so bad that they can't help themselves.

[Candace Odgers]

I am not saying in any way that the phone should be on the desk, dinging, et cetera. That is nowhere where I'm going here. And so I think the real risk here is that we have these problems, policies that go through, and adults, policymakers can declare victory that they've done something and that they've solved some sort of learning loss issue or mental health problem. And again, it's that redirection. It's an opportunity cost where we should be focused on young people and what they need. Instead, we're investing all of Our efforts in these policy solutions which don't seem to match the problem. We could say that we just as a value normative judgment, we don't want phones in schools and you can do that. But that's not what's happening. They're making an argument that this is actually going to improve mental health, that it's going to improve learning, that's going to reduce bullying, that's going to help absenteeism, and that is just a story that's being sold to distract us.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

We have to talk about AI because you know, there are those who are calling that it's the final chapter for social media and it may not matter within five to 10 years anyway. And AI is the next thing and that kids are really, really vulnerable. Chatbots that seem like people that can convince them to do things, maybe even harm themselves. There are numerous cases, parents going up against tech companies saying that they caused their kid to kill themselves. It's a really serious situation and it sounds really, really scary. Candace, what's your take?

[Candace Odgers]

Yeah, so when I sit back, I think, you know, what can we learn from this journey we've been on with technology and young people and where the real harms are and where the fears are and how our policy making really hasn't worked to date. And I think we know a couple of things. I think we know that young people are going to be early and enthusiastic adopters of any new technology. And we're seeing that loud and clear with artificial intelligence. The other thing we know is that tech companies cannot be trusted to put in guardrails that are developmentally appropriate. And so we can't trust them to regulate this and there is just too much money involved and the incentives are not aligned. And so that creates a toxic mix. The third thing we know is that banning is not going to work. They will be interacting with these agents and on these platforms regardless of what we do in terms of the ban. So how can we position ourselves to get the safeguards in place within the models and within the companies and also work to educate young people and their families around AI risks and benefits? Because the other thing is that this will be the workforce of the future. Right? And what will happen is if we ban AI in schools, that all of the high SES families will send their kids to Stanford or here to UCI and they will get educated in the latest and the greatest and using AI and lower income kids will be left out of not only the education part of this, but the job market.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, anecdotally I see my younger daughter who's 16, who will not touch AI. She's been convinced that morally it is reprehensible. Whereas I'm also seeing, you know, these graduation ceremonies at universities where every time the commencement speaker says the word AI, the kids boo, presumably because they're worried about their livelihoods going forward and getting jobs. And then I see a more pragmatic approach, my son's professor, who required them to use AI in a class and talk about what it did and how it worked and how it was helpful and where the dangers were and all of those things. So, you know, we're figuring it out is what it feels like.

[Candace Odgers]

There's the continuum, right? There's the people that think that this will be the opportunity in terms of personalized education, and the effects are vanished. Very different. For example, in the global south, right, where we don't have enough teachers or enough room in the school for all the children, or it might not be safe to get to school, or you might be out harvesting a crop. And there are real opportunities to deliver personalized learning and low cost tutoring and all the rest of those things. So it really is the challenge of how to realize the potential of this without, you know, being subjected to all the harms. And I think the other thing that we know from just years and years of comms research is anytime a new technology rolls out, it will amplify inequalities because people who are positioned and families who are positioned to tailor this for their young people and to use it in ways that will enhance learning and, you know, prospects in the job market will do that. Right? And so if we don't design from the beginning in ways that brings all our young people along around digital literacy and training and safety, you know, then we're gonna have even bigger gaps within education, you know, mental health and other things that we care about.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I wonder if I can end our conversation with a question that I had. I had breakfast with a friend the other day and he said to me, my 12 year old wants to be on Snapchat. What should I do? You tell me how I did, Candace. I said, well, why does he want to be on Snapchat? And he said, because three out of five of his besties are on there. I was like, so it's to talk to them? Yes. Okay. And I said, well, I'm gonna tell you what I think Candace Odgers would say, which is, have you had a conversation with your son about the Internet generally, what's on there? What's, you know, false information, ideas that you don't feel comfortable with as a family. Yes, I've done that. I was like, good job, friend. And I said, and I think she would say, but most importantly, is your kid having other issues? Like, is he having sleep problems? Is he struggling at school? Is he struggling with these friendships? And he said, no, he seems fine. I was like, I think Candace would say, like, pick your battles, and maybe this isn't one of them. How did I do?

[Candace Odgers]

Candace, you did great. I would add one thing, and this is something I had to learn, and I learned it from the young people in our study, which was when you first turn over either a device or you open up a new platform for the young person in your life, have the conversation that if something bad or scary or upsetting happens here, I want you to talk to me about it. And if you do, I will never shut this off or take it away for doing that. Because we hear time and time again that young people hide, don't tell, don't go to a trusted adult because they're worried the adults will take the tech away. And that now, in retrospect, seems obvious to me, but I needed the 13 year olds to tell me before I changed my own parenting strategy.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Well, you've just sort of shamed me into asking, what else do they tell you? Because I should have asked that earlier in this conversation.

[Candace Odgers]

It is really actually incredible to see the way that young people can creatively use digital technology. They are actually better in so many ways at silencing notifications, curating their own feeds. They also think we're terrible at it, and they're probably not wrong. And so one of the other things that I love to do with a car full of kids when I'm driving carpool is to just put out some question about tech and, like, how I should do it. And they just fill up the car with advice and really good advice, actually.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Like what? Give me one.

[Candace Odgers]

So my daughter went on Snapchat pretty young. And the reason that she went on is we had suffered a really sad loss in our extended family. And the children that were impacted by this were far away and we wanted to be there as a group. And they were on snapshot. So we all went on to kind of have fun together. But my husband and I were kicked off the chat and I didn't know why. Right. I didn't fully understand. Because you're grown ups. Well, wait, right. So that's true. The kids do not want us in their spaces. Well, we weren't actually kicked off the chat, just kind of went quiet and I realized that they had gravitated towards another group. So this might have happened in your lives, but, you know, we were on Snapchat where the norm is like a funny picture and then you're done. And I was writing like War and Peace, you know, checking in on everybody, mothering. And so you miss what's funny, you miss the norms. You use the emoji in the wrong way, and there's just a sign that you're an old in the young space. And they want their space. They want to own their space. And right now we're just coming in and taking away their spaces, and we're not giving them alternative spaces to go to that are safer and allow them to do the things that they need to do to develop and grow.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I have such admiration for Candace. It is not easy to go against the tide, to try to explain to people that we can have real distrust and disdain for how the tech companies have designed their products and manipulated us and our children, but that we need to dig deeper to understand the real reasons why American adults and kids are struggling with their mental health, as Candace likes to say. She's Canadian, so she doesn't have trouble calling for government regulation and funding as a means to improving the most vulnerable lives. But her message is not a simple one. It's not as easy as, like, this generation is a mess, right? Nuance, though, is harder to put into simple words. It's harder for people to hear and to grasp. But there is something very straightforward about Candace, and I do appreciate her advice, which I think is very clear. If your teen is generally doing okay, you don't have to be quite so terrified if they're spending some time online. Take a deep breath. Kids are amazing, as she reminds us, and we need to keep remembering that when we talk to them about new technology like AI, we need to consider all the other support we need to offer them both inside and outside of school. And we need to think about what we can learn from them as adults who are trying to figure out how to move forward in this age of AI, too. That was Candice Odgers at TED 2026 in conversation with me, Manoosh Zumarodi. You can also watch Candace's full [e-mail] thank you so much for joining me here on the next episode. Covid made this vaccine researcher famous, but she has some regrets about how she and her fellow scientists communicated their breakthrough innovation to the public. Kizzmekia Corbett has quite a story. That's tomorrow, and that's it for today. If you are curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.comCurationGuidelines Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was produced by Avery Keatley, Lucy Little and Rachel Faulkner White. It was edited by Alejandra Salazar with editing support from Maggie Bishop, Martha Estefanos, Sanaz Meshkinpour and me, and this episode was mixed by Matthew Polis. Candice's top was fact checked by the TED research team and our conversation was fact checked by Rachel Faulkner White. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner and Tansika Sangmar Nivong with support from Daniela Valarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Bian Man Chang and Lainey Lott. Special thanks to Sanaz Mesh Kinpour and my team at NPR's TED Radio Hour for all their help on this special takeover. And to my co curator at TED 2026, a very special thank you to David Biello. You can hear more from these speakers on the TED Radio Hour with episodes coming out throughout the summer. I'm Anoush Samaroti and I will be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks again for listening.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

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[Candace Odgers]

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