Last week TED posted an April talk by the teen expert and researcher Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist and associate dean for research at the University of California Irvine. The title of her talk was “What we're getting wrong about teens and tech,” and her answer to what we’re getting wrong about teens and tech is that we are increasingly banning them from using social media.

After Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation became a bestseller, Odgers emerged as one of his more thoughtful critics. In a review of the book for Nature, Odgers challenged his thesis that social media is to blame for the deteriorating mental health of young people.

“[T]he book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science,” she writes. “Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.”

Unlike the voluble Haidt, Odgers has been harder to draw out on the subject — perhaps leery of the risk of defining her own research in opposition to one bestselling author. (Although Odgers and Haidt notably did participate in a joint discussion about where they agree and disagree in 2024; you can watch it on YouTube.) 

For that reason, I was eager to hear her make her case at TED. After all, it came at a time when social media bans are close to becoming a foregone conclusion in Western democracies.

Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Slovenia are among the countries that have enacted or are preparing measures to limit children's use of social platforms — typically barring users under 15 or 16 from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and X. The bans reflect mounting anxiety over the apps’ effects on child safety, mental health harms, and algorithmic influence.

In her talk, Odgers argues that the panic over teenagers and social media is mostly grounded in fiction — fiction that has been a huge commercial success. (While she never names The Anxious Generation, it is clearly Haidt that she is sparring with onstage.) Drawing on longitudinal studies she has run since 2008, tracking thousands of 10-to-14-year-olds through their phones, school records, and sleep data, Odgers says social media does not emerge as a meaningful predictor of teen mental health. Depressed girls use social media more, she says, but social media use doesn’t seem to predict later depression. 

The real crisis, in Odgers’ telling, is among adults: parental overdose deaths more than doubled between 2011 and 2021, and caregivers’ mental health is among the strongest predictors of child outcomes. Meanwhile teenagers are graduating high school at record rates while violence, drinking, and pregnancy sit at historic lows.

Given those facts, Odgers argues that bans are the wrong intervention: no study has tested whether removing social media improves teen mental health, and she predicts that bans will simply push kids into less regulated corners of the internet while letting platforms "off the hook." What would work, she says, is investing in the adults around children — hiring school counselors, building drop-in centers and digital mental health services — funded by taxing the platforms.

It’s true that the data on social media and kids is mixed, and effect sizes tend to be small when they are visible at all. It would be foolish to assume that banning kids from using social media will immediately reset their mental health and lead to a new golden age of in-person socializing.

And yet I found myself disappointed by Odgers’ talk, which focused on sociological research — her specialty, admittedly — while omitting serious discussion of the direct harms that social networks are often complicit in or responsible for.