Screens Aren’t Destroying Young Minds. I Should Know.
Laws restricting phone use won’t solve the root causes of adolescent anxiety.
As a member of Gen Z, I have studied the effects of social media on adolescent mental health from a perspective most psychology researchers lack: I grew up under its influence.
Between ages 12 and 17, I was obese, socially isolated and addicted to the fantasy video game RuneScape. I was home-schooled, lived with just my mother and rarely went outside. I logged over 10,000 hours in that game alone, nearly a third of my waking life during those years.
That doesn’t include countless additional hours I spent on other video games, television and, of course, social media. I made friends through online chatrooms and pen pal websites because I had none in real life. I averaged well over 10 hours a day on devices.
If ever there were a case study for the claim that screens destroy young minds, I would seem to fit it. And yet here I am as a 26-year-old developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. I am in good mental and physical health, with deep friendships online and off.
Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.
Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” argues that smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The book has helped inspire social media restrictions in Australia and several American states, and shaped how a generation of parents thinks about technology.
Restricting screen time and social media access are reasonable aspirations for child-rearing. But as a matter of public policy, the case for regulation rests on a scientific foundation far weaker than its proponents claim.
Haidt’s argument relies on the observation that adolescent mental health indicators worsened around 2010, when smartphones and social media apps popular with young people — such as Instagram and Snapchat — started becoming widespread. But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis. Wealthy Western democracies with the highest smartphone adoption rates have also seen expanded access to psychiatric services and a cultural shift toward identifying and labeling psychological distress, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy.”
Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
Many studies have reported on how social media use is associated with mental health problems among the young. However, a 2024 analysis in JAMA Pediatrics of 143 studies featuring data from over 1 million adolescents worldwide found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent across studies and drawn mostly from nonclinical community samples.
One reason studies report mixed findings is that many fail to account for factors such as personality traits and social support that independently predict heavy screen use and mental distress. For example, social media use may be associated with anxiety and loneliness, not because it causes them, but because socially anxious individuals are more likely to seek out connections online. Statistically controlling for such factors often accounts for the relationship between social media and mental health.
I am not dismissing the possibility that some children are harmed by some content in some contexts. Many in my generation have had online exposure to graphic, violent and sexual imagery that no child should encounter. But the blanket claim that social media use drives generational mental illness does not align with the evidence.
Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father. The variables that predict youth mental health are not hours spent on social media but social support, resilience and a sense of belonging. To help struggling adolescents, the evidence points toward strengthening those capacities, not confiscating phones.
During my most isolated years, online connections were the only positive relationships I had. Internet forums helped me navigate college applications and taught me about calorie-counting, which sparked a weight-loss journey that changed my life. Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.
Concerns about social media are well-intentioned. But sincerity is not proof. The dramatic assertions that children’s lives would be transformed by reducing social media exposure are more akin to moral panics over past technologies and obsessions — from radio to comic books to video games — fueled by weak social science and strong public emotion. In the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth mental health has been improving recently, despite no change in access to social media. The simplest explanation might be that social media is not as harmful as people think.
This article was originally published at the Washington Post on 4/12/2026.
Respectfully, I am going to push back.
As a few have noted, you're using your lone experience as a key basis of your argument. You are clearly an intelligent individual who was able to utilize a screen as both a place of escape and learning. This is not so easy for many of our most impressionable minds.
What I would liked to have seen in this article, though you hadn't intended to do more than push back against screen usage as the culprit for the decline in our student's school performances, is what alternative -and reasonable- answers are there for why reading, writing, and critical thinking are not improving but declining. I might have also liked some insight into your homeschooling experience. Some are truly amazing. I suspect yours was, given your impressive schooling.
Like you, I'm going to offer a lone perspective; so every reader is welcome to dismiss my words out of hand. I have 31 years of service as a reading specialist in an affluent community in CT. I am very much beholden to data, both subjective and non-subjective in determining my student's abilities as readers and writers. (I should also add that in 2012 we became a one-to-one iPad school beginning in grade one. Each student had a school issued iPad for use the entire calendar year.) Two stats I've collected for our school, a grade 5 and 6 school of 600, are a non-subjective reading measure (the Degrees of Reading Power) and our book circulation numbers. Both of these have steadily moved down in perfect step with the rise of personal screens for students. I should also add that our state given assessments, the Smarter Balanced Assessment, has also trended in the wrong direction. Yes, you can poke all sorts of holes in numbers such as how one class or 5th and 6th graders can't be directly compared to the one before or after it, how there is no perfect measure of reading ability, etc. Go nuts, but in the absence of any other ways to measure student reading performances, it's what I must turn to.
I, and my colleagues, have watched our once vaunted school system turn into something less impressive. We remain above state and most certainly national standards year to year but nothing like we used to be. We've moved to restrict iPad use to classrooms only. They cannot be on in hallways or when waiting for homeroom to begin. Phones and electronic watches are also not an option. We are even moving to Chromebooks in place of iPads so the tool is a little less distracting and more limited in its purposes. We have seen improvement in student interactions as they now have no option but to engage with one another when boredom arrives. I'd love to write that this also translated into growth in academic numbers but I cannot, at this time.
The issue of screens, from my perspective (and I'll wager most any teacher) is how they take away from sustained focus on the printed word. This matters. Reading is by definition not natural to humans and complex. It's why we have English class assigned as an area of study for as long as you much go to school. It is hard and not innate. Studies show over and over that sustained reading has a wide range of beneficial outcomes and no discernible negative ones. Those who read have better focus, are more empathetic, can think critically, and remain more like than others to have careers that result in better pay.
Screens are hardly used for the purpose of reading. The outcomes of perpetual screen usage, from this lone individual who has served our youngest minds for three plus decades, are student who are not any less intelligent that those from decades ago, but students who are fatigued often, prone to anger and distraction quite frequently, open to debating everything they feel is hard, unable to see different points of view, limited focus, and poor critical thinking skills. Honestly, I could go on with the list of declining abilities that I personally and whole-hardheartedly believe the rise of screen time has done negatively to our youngest.
I will agree that railing against screens feels a lot like those who once railed against the TV and the home computer and things of that nature because they believed they rotted students' minds. I will agree but only to a point. The TV and my desktop computer weren't portable, not were they always capable of entertaining me. Screen time today is preposterously different and portable.
Parents. Parents play a large part in this too, of course. Many, most, whom I come t work with are well-intended people but when questions get to what study time and screen usage look like at home, you'd be amazed at how little of one and how much of the other occurs. Many parents need as much guidance as their children on how to help their kids see the phone, iPad, and laptops as tools for honing the mind, not merely occupying it.
"Law restricting phone use won't solve the root causes of adolescent anxiety," you wrote. No, certainly, not on its own. This is an all hands on deck task involving homes and schools working in the same direction. But, I'm at a loss to understand how having a law restricting phones in school is anything but beneficial.
You noted you were overweight for many years and the Internet provided the path out of that situation. Awesome... for you. It's not this way for many kids from my lone perspective. Might you have been less overweight if your screen time was far less and boredom brought you outside to explore and play? You noted friendships were limited in the real world, might limited screen time forced you to alter this by stepping outside more? Maybe not the case at all for you. Truly, I am glad you found your way to good health (all that matters) and the ability to harness your potential as a thinker and human. This is not what most teachers are experiencing in schools these days.
I do not know if you have children. My wife and I have three adult boys/men now. We held off on phones and game systems for many years before handing these to them. Even then, they didn't have phones until their last two years of HS. We felt the negative side to these portable screens, far outweighed the positive. We were also insistent that they read -a lot. We never filtered what they read, beyond my insistence on getting away from graphics novels as quickly as possible. They are each with jobs and living on their own. Yep, it's another isolated perspective given here but I do wonder how you plan to (or how you are) raising your own kids in a time of screens.
I'll close with a repeat of something I touched on before. My school kids, all kids, are absolutely no less intelligent that those who came before them. They are also excellent at accepting differences and saying the right things in this evolving world of how we interact with one another. They are also falling well short of being readers, of being individuals who can focus their thoughts to reach a place of introspection and self-improvement. Reading is it's own form of meditation; screens are not.
Anecdotal evidence of n=1 vs mountains of social science data.