What Our Children Are Carrying

There is a generation of young people currently in their teens and twenties who are, by every available measure, the most anxious and depressed that researchers have ever studied in western countries. The rates of anxiety disorder among adolescents roughly doubled in the decade between 2012 and 2022. Hospital admissions for self-harm among teenage girls tripled in some countries over the same period^[1]. The data isn't ambiguous. Something happened to the mental health of young people in the early 2010s that has continued to compound. Parents can feel it. Teachers are overwhelmed by it. Clinicians are working with levels of adolescent distress that have no recent precedent.

I want to be careful not to flatten this into a single cause because that would be dishonest. Haidt's smartphone thesis is compelling and the evidence for it is significant but young people are also living through the compounding anxieties of climate, political instability, economic precarity and a school system that has increased its academic pressure while reducing the unstructured time that young nervous systems need to regulate. All of these things are real. The tech argument, though, has a specificity that the others lack: a precise timeline, a replication across countries that otherwise have very different circumstances and a dose-response relationship, meaning the more time spent on social media, the worse the outcomes, particularly for girls.

What the smartphone and social media did to adolescent development, in the most concrete terms I can describe, is this: they moved the primary social world of teenagers from physical to digital and made that digital social world available and visible twenty-four hours a day. Adolescence is the developmental period in which young people are working out who they are, where they fit and whether they're acceptable. That is the psychological work of the teenage years and it has always been painful work. What changed is that this work is now conducted in a permanent public forum with an infinite audience, real-time metrics on how well you're doing, no off hours and no private space to fail in. The cruelty that's always existed in adolescent social hierarchies didn't become more extreme. It became more constant and more inescapable.

Sleep is part of the story too and it's one that gets less attention than the social comparison angle. Adolescent brains need more sleep than adult brains and the quality of that sleep is foundational to emotional regulation, learning and mental health. Devices in bedrooms have become one of the most reliable disruptors of adolescent sleep. Not only because young people use them late into the night but because the notifications, the fear of missing something and the emotional activation of social feeds keep the nervous system aroused when it should be moving into rest. A teenager who is chronically under-slept is a teenager whose emotional regulation is compromised. Her anxiety is higher. Her resilience is lower. Her capacity to manage the social pressures of the school day is reduced. Sleep loss and social media combine into a feedback loop that is difficult to interrupt from the outside.

I want to say something to the adults in this conversation who are parents, because the anxiety around parenting in the tech age is itself enormous and often counterproductive. The research is fairly clear that delayed smartphone access, particularly delaying the introduction of social media until around sixteen, is associated with better mental health outcomes. The movement toward phone-free schools is supported by the evidence and worth endorsing. But I'm cautious about the conversation that frames this entirely as a parenting failure, partly because the social pressure on young people to have the same devices as their peers is a real and not trivial force and partly because the parents of the current generation were themselves navigating a novel technological landscape without a map.

What I think is more useful than guilt is curiosity. Curiosity about what your child's relationship with their phone is actually doing: what need it's meeting, what it's helping them avoid and what's underneath the scroll. Because the phone in a teenager's hand is, in many cases, serving the same function it serves in an adult's: managing anxiety, seeking approval and escaping discomfort. The question that matters is not just the hours. It's the why. A teenager who is on her phone for four hours a day because she's lonely and doesn't know how to tell you is a different situation from one who is on her phone for four hours a day because her friend group communicates through it. The hours might be the same. The intervention that's needed is not.

The thing I keep coming back to, when I think about what young people are carrying, is that they're carrying something genuinely new. The adult generation alongside them grew up with technology arriving gradually. Most of today's parents didn't have social media until their twenties and many of them find it difficult even as adults. The teenagers who grew up with it from the age of twelve, who have never known an adolescent social world that wasn't mediated by a screen, are navigating something their parents can offer limited guidance on from direct experience. That's not an indictment of parents. It's an honest account of an unprecedented situation. The appropriate response is not to judge the young people for struggling. It's to take seriously how much they need the kind of genuine human accompaniment that the phone cannot provide.