Banning child access to social media has been in the news lately. The issue certainly raises a variety of difficult questions, e.g. what age group defines a child, verification of age, enforcement, what constitutes harm, does it work, etc.
Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, has raised multiple eyebrows and been adopted as the basis for a push from parents and educators, who, unable to control their own children, seek to have social media platforms do it for them. Haidt has come under attack for not being able to supply evidence for his assertions. A review in Nature says flatly:
“Second, the 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. 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.”
I read Haidt’s The Righteous Mind ** and was impressed, but I also understand how tenuous “evidence” can be in the world of psychology. Any profession that decides whether a condition is treatable or not by vote of the members should be treated with some skepticism. [1] I also remember other moral panics, most notably the terrible fear among parents (my mother included) of comic books during the fifties when I was growing up. Another panic was over the harm done to children by television. Every new technology (see my post about AI) creates fear.
The review of Haidt’s book in Nature by Candice Odgers complains that he confuses causation with correlation. Haidt has numerous graphs showing the rise of mental illness (here again a problem in that problems often arise in direct proportion to the amount of money available to treat them) with the rise of social media use by adolescents. Odgers argues that Jonathan Haidt’s central claim—that social media is rewiring children’s brains and fueling a teenage mental health epidemic—doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny. She says Haidt tells a compelling story, but one that leans heavily on dramatic trends and correlations rather than convincing evidence of cause and effect.
Odgers points out that years of research, including large meta-analyses and international studies, have found little to no consistent evidence that social media directly causes depression, anxiety, or widespread mental illness. In many cases, the relationship runs the other way: teens who are already struggling tend to use social media differently or more often. She also notes that major brain-development studies have found no signs of the sweeping neurological "rewiring" Haidt describes.
A bigger problem, she argues, is that Haidt’s theory oversimplifies a much messier reality. Rising youth mental health problems are linked to a web of factors—including poverty, economic insecurity, discrimination, violence, the opioid crisis, and limited access to mental health care. Focusing too narrowly on smartphones risks distracting attention from these deeper causes and from evidence-based solutions.
Odgers isn’t defending social media as harmless. She agrees platforms need stronger safeguards, better content moderation, and age-appropriate design. But she questions proposals like phone bans and strict age restrictions, arguing they may be ineffective or even backfire.
Her bottom line is that Haidt is a gifted storyteller, but his narrative outruns the evidence. Young people are facing a genuine mental health crisis, she argues, and they deserve policies grounded in robust science—not a simple explanation that current research doesn’t support.
Professor Peter Etchells, another psychologist who studies digital technology, also provides an antidote to Haidt’s fear mongering. If Haidt's The Anxious Generation is the blockbuster disaster movie of the smartphone age, Pete Etchells' Unlocked is the scientist walking into the theater afterward saying, "Interesting story—but let's check the evidence."
Etchells argues that we've become addicted not just to our phones but to dramatic explanations for complicated problems. He patiently dismantles familiar claims about screen time wrecking attention spans, rewiring brains, or causing a youth mental health epidemic, showing that the research is far more nuanced than many headlines suggest. Screens can certainly create problems, he says, but they're only one piece of a much larger puzzle involving family life, schools, economics, personality, and mental health.
The result isn't a defense of Big Tech or an argument that people should stare at their phones all day. It's a plea to replace fear with evidence—and guilt with smarter habits. Instead of asking, "How many hours are you on your phone?" Etchells wants us to ask, "What are you actually doing there, and how is it affecting your life?" It's a calmer, more scientifically grounded conversation about technology, and reviewers say that's exactly what makes the book so refreshing.
In late 2025, Australia banned anyone under sixteen from having a social media account. Those adolescents who had become so-called “influencers” (a scary concept in itself) are already avoiding the ban by registering their accounts with a parent — parents are often complicit in their children’s use of social media — so as to avoid losing income and their platform. Australia's much-watched ban on social media for under-16s has turned into a reminder that passing a law is easier than making the internet obey it. Early evaluations found that most major platforms still let test users create accounts simply by entering a birth date—without asking for meaningful proof of age—and only one platform consistently verified users. The government has responded by threatening tougher enforcement and bigger fines, while researchers say the real test will come once platforms deploy more sophisticated age-estimation systems. So far, the verdict is mixed: the law has certainly grabbed the world's attention, but it hasn't yet delivered the airtight digital bouncer its supporters envisioned. From my experience teens are masters of the Internet and have a work-around to any age requirement. I can think of several myself and I’m 79.
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**My review at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/407216266
[1] See Drescher, J. (2015). Out of DSM: Depathologizing homosexuality. Behavioral Sciences, 5(4), 565-575. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040565 and Winterhalter, E. (2025, December 3). How LGBTQ+ activists got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM. JSTOR Daily.
Resources and additional reading:
A brief history of moral panics about kids and media. (2025, January 20). Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-to-learn/202501/a-brief-history-of-moral-panics-about-kids-and-media
Comic Book Censorship, 1948-1955. (n.d.). Just a moment... https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/comic-book-censorship-1948-1955/
Etchells, P. (2024). Unlocked: The real science of screen time (and how to spend it better). Piatkus. (Review to follow eventually)
Ferguson, C. J., & Faye, C. (2018, January 1). A history of panic over entertainment technology. Behavioral Scientist. https://behavioralscientist.org/history-panic-entertainment-technology/
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin.
Levy, S. (2024, May 10). There's no undoing tech's great rewiring of childhood. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-theres-no-undoing-techs-great-rewiring-of-childhood/
Locke, C. (2025, December 10). Kids and teen influencers in Australia say ‘bye-bye’ to social media. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/kids-and-teen-influencers-in-australia-say-goodbye-to-social-media/
Odgers, Candice. The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? (2024, March 29). Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
Reynolds, M. (2024, March 29). Screen time for kids is fine! Unless it's not. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/pete-etchells-jonathan-haidt-smartphones/
Why Won't You Just Read It? Comic Books and Community in the 1950s. (n.d.). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED387852. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED387852
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