Are we using screens as a scapegoat for teen mental health?

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earths. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manush Zamorodi. Today, we are talking about the relationship between kids,

“screens and social media. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's a topic we have covered on the”

show before. And it's fraught. Most of us have heard how harmful tech can be for kids and their mental health. Anxiety levels are through the roof. The mental health issues are through the roof. Are we just going to sit by and watch that happen? Are we in response? Many states in the U.S. have passed laws, banning, cell phones, and schools. They just have no place in a formal education process.

Vote. Yes. Some countries are banning teens from social media all together. In Australia, he used Instagram, Facebook, and Threads are about to start seeing their accounts closed down, but maybe these tactics don't address what's really going on. This is child psychologist Candice Rogers. I study children's mental health and spend a lot

“of time working with them on their mobile devices. Trying to understand the influence”

of all the things in their life, but digital technology in particular on mental health sleep, and they're well-being. Candice does her research at UC Irvine and at Duke University, and she understands why parents are worried. But she says the message that we've been getting that technology is causing an epidemic of mental illness in young people is not based on solid science. I'm not saying there are no harms. What I am saying is that

the story that we're repeatedly told is parents and policymakers and people that are vested that social media is universally harmful, that it is damaging brains, that is leading to an epidemic of mental health problems that simply isn't supported by the data. Blaming tech as the root cause versus taking a more nuanced approach to teen mental health, it's a debate that has been roiling academic circles for years. And it's hard for parents

to know what to think. Candice wants us all to take a deep breath and be open to a larger conversation about what is happening with kids today. When you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list. It's one of the least influential factors in predicting children's mental health. On the show, the controversy over teens and screens, what can we blame tech for and when

do we need to take a harder look at how we're all letting down young people, especially here in the US. Developmental psychologists, Candice Rogers explains what teens are really stressed out about, including rising rates of anxiety and depression in the adults in their lives. And we'll also get into how to know if tech is or isn't a problem for your child. A warning this episode includes mentions of suicide. So let's get back to Candice Rogers,

here she is on the Ted stage. 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. 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 a 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 in their brains. It doesn't match the data, and it doesn't match what

to a simple truth that we all know. Scary stories so. They always have. And 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. You have been doing this research, Candice, for two decades. Take us back to when you first got started and how you began doing it. Yeah, so we were bringing at that point young people into the lab who we 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 time. And parents had a ton of questions for us about what

the kinds of things we're still asking today. So what's the age at which my child should be given a phone, our children losing their communication skills. You know, is this harmful for them to be

spending time online? And you know, at that time we didn't know the answer. This was a new field.

And I expected that there would be some negative effects. And we were really shocked because what we found was that there wasn't this overly negative story in the research at that time. And we started to add questions about what young people were doing online. And you know, of course, over time, the methods have really evolved. We now do passive sensing and we scrape data and we do screen capture and we have much more sophisticated methods. But at that time, we were just surprised that,

there wasn't, you know, have a more consistently negative effects that people were finding. 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 at school and family conflict and how much exercise they're getting in a day, for example. Yeah, we have to remember 20 years ago, social media wasn't really big. And so you were really using technology as a tool. You were not

studying technologies, effect on kids necessarily or just starting to. Yeah. But what turned out is we had a front row seat to the rise of it, right? So it wasn't really fascinating time. 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. 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?”

Yeah. So at that time, we were really in a panic over 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 or for these horrible acts we're seeing with gun violence in our schools. And so the focus was really on video games at that time. And then it shifted and then it was screened in general. So what are screens and screen time doing to our children? And there's a Atlantic article by the college named Gene Twingy that asked this question, have smartphones destroyed a generation? And everybody quickly said, yes, right? Yes, they have.

And so the target then became screen time in general. And that was that was set off a whole debate about whether screen time was associated with poor outcomes. And we had all of these data that essentially show there's no association or this tiny correlation. And then suddenly it started to narrow down the let's not just screen time with social media and it's oh, well, it's not just social media, social media on girls. And 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 current computational agents. So the new tech will continue to evolve. And that will be continued to be the new target of kind of our

“IR as parents and policymakers. Okay, so here we are all these years later. How do you do your work now?”

Yeah, and so we're really fortunate. We have a partnership with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. So we're able to draw sample from a roster of every child attending public school in the state. And that means that we can survey adolescents and bring in a group of adolescents as representative of the larger state population and North Carolina maps fairly well onto the U.S. population. And so in these studies what we do is we typically,

you know, assess young people and their parents. We are able to look at their school records and information on test scores and suspensions or absenteeism. We know the poverty levels of their neighborhoods and their families. We know a lot about them. And then when we go in and we'll take a sub sample of those young people. So we started out with, you know, in one study it was 2,100 adolescents and we followed them across four years and then did these deep dives where we

install an app on their phone and start to track mental health symptoms every day, sleep through wearable devices. And we've done other studies where we passively sense for over 90

how much they're moving, what kind of information they're typing into their keyboard. This is all

“with their consent. And we involve youth at every stage. So we have a youth advisory board that”

screens our protocols and that works with us to make sure that we're asking the right questions and we're not just another bunch of adults we're making assumptions. I want to share with you a few science-based chat facts about kids today. And I'm going to focus on American teams because that's for 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. 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 and youth suicide risk.

But perhaps this shouldn't be surprising because adult suicide has been increasing dramatically in the United States since 1999. 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.”

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 died.

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, including, and I'm going to quote, that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health. Now despite this, adults are quickly converging on banning social media for under 16s as a simple and singular solution

dissolving the youth mental health crisis. And here is the crazy part. There's not one single

“study to date that is actually tested when they're 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. The National Academies of Sciences, one of the most well-respected organizations in the world, convened the next part panel, and they came to this conclusion also. When we come back, more with child psychologist, Candace Rogers, on kids, their mental health, and why she thinks screens are not the biggest problem for teens.

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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manush Zamarote. A couple months back, we had NYU social

how the great rewiring of children is causing an epidemic of mental illness. His book has been on the bestseller list for years now and many lawmakers and parents cite his research when they push for banning phones in schools and getting teens off social media. All over the world in the 2010s, family life became a fight over screen time. Parents saw their children being pulled away, pulled away from them, pulled away from each other,

pulled away from life, pulled into this weird world where all kinds of weird and horrible things happened to them. They saw kids getting depressed, anxious, suddenly coming down with eating disorders.

2012 is when is the crucial year where kids are switching over from flip phones to smartphones,

iPhones in America. But child psychologist Candice Rogers says we need to look beyond

“just technology. It's not the only thing that happened over the last 10, 15, 20 years.”

We've seen an increase in school shooting during this time as well. We've seen a change in the demographics of US adolescents 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 a lot of factors and so when we look at that period and people draw these graphs and say social media increases like

what else could possibly be happening. We have to have a discussion about adult mental health

in this conversation so we need to broaden the tense. To some a lay person mapping the rise in suicides and depression and anxiety and young people with the rise in use of social media and smartphones I mean it's compelling Candice. It also I think is like oh look we can see why this is happening so we can fix it. Yeah I think it is simple to scare people with statistics and 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 there's so much incentive right now to sell these scary stories about our young people because it sells and we just did a we deserve a of California

“voters and the only thing that democrats and republicans and independence agreed on was that they”

wanted to ban smartphones and schools and they wanted to get kids off of social media. There are no differences between democrats independence and republicans on that issue in America today which is incredible. So if you were running for office this isn't easy thing to target. Children don't vote they're not going to get to say you know in terms of advocating to have right to this information that's online or to have access to these types of platforms so they're 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 the harm or to advocate for big tech I mean no but what what we're doing is we're actually giving them a pass when we go right to a ban 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 they've done it

they've finally just broken it and now we're just going to kick kids off and say that the problem is solved.

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 yet sadly many times to escape people that are harming them offline so has social media ban might feel good

“so they add also the room but teens tell me and I believe them it's not going to work it'll push”

them into less safe unless regulated spaces and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them to be well yeah so that is where I think people get tangled up or I certainly get tangled up is like we agree 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

companies their parents too that work at those places we have to 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 that's a great question and people actually have approached me because I've been pretty vocal on this and said okay can't us just back off like what's the big deal what's the harm and going forward you know and using children as a tip of the sphere here if it's going to

if it's going to result and be the thing that we can finally you know use to slay social media

companies and you know I thought about this a lot and one of the parallels I draw is that if someone was going around and saying you know 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 people are dying people are being harmed due to mental health

problems 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 is

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 right that it means that they are addicted that the behavior that they're engaging in is shameful that parents should be ashamed of letting their children engage in these activities that are pretty normative and that they do themselves you know we are

sending messages that are not based on evidence right that are shaming our young people and then are really allowing us to you know bypass the harder work that has to be done in order to actually

“support young people and address mental health issues it's tricky because I think many people”

cheered right when a California jury a couple months ago found meta and YouTube libel in this land marker bell weather case that accused the tech giants of intentionally addicting a specific young woman and hurting her mental health and the prosecutors leaned on the design element that the way that the platforms had been designed created addictive behaviors that led this young woman down a very dangerous mental health crisis and as much as I know that you're not a big fan of meta or

YouTube necessarily do you think that the jury was right on this and will there be like in terms of an appeal will those companies have a case because this is on shaky ground based on what your research says I think so yeah so it's a civil trial and juries are going to take their pound of flesh right it feels good to hate social media right now and these are going to be chances to kind of get retribution and get a payout for sure um now weather not it would meet the

standard of evidence if you had to actually prove that this was a cause you know that's that's

“going to be a much harder harder case to you know to to make and I think you know this the cases”

are tricky because the arguments that are being made on the design elements of the platforms and we can agree that the auto play is not good there's many which it should be safety but I design I agree it all of those things but we cannot separate design from content right so if you have an auto play of me teaching statistics kids would not watch that right even if you auto play it right so stretch the occasion model no no no right but you know an auto play of them doing

the latest you know it's not six seven anymore but you know whatever is the latest trending thing they're they're going to watch that and so we're trying to you know separate these hard things and attack it on on kind of harmful design principles and that seems to seem to be effective and we'll see see see where that takes us but we're going to have a flood of lawsuits and I know because my phone rings every day from all signs to testify and what I do is I simply ship them off

a fact sheet because what I say about this is not going to change you know depending on who who I'm talking to right so I just have a simple fact sheet that said this is the evidence this is what the National Academy of Sciences says here's where all of the reviews of all of

this evidence say you know here's what the numbers are here's what you know the the people who are

doing the most work closest to young people are saying about this and I share that and both sides

going to play out for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with science or what teens even

“really need I suppose right 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 conversations

deep conversations with my kids but maybe that's not happening like yeah what what are we supposed to do you're talking about an entire society that is falling apart from so many different ways some people would say whether it's like lack of healthcare and the social support and poverty and you know food scarcity even yeah so I think the first thing to do is is to it's going to feel good to ban and to blame and that's you know maybe maybe that's okay for adults to feel good

about that for a while but I think if we're look it's not at all clear that that's going to help young people right so we know that the bands are coming but they're hugely popular and those

are really normative and value-based judgments 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 you know how much screen time their childhood should have or how they should make these decisions in terms of what they they want kind of normatively but if you're doing this for 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 that's a message that's not supported you know by the science and you know we could make those decisions based on values but I wouldn't make them from a place of fear where your child is going to fall into 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 and we just know I mean

if we step back and think about this at all we know that banning use from online spaces is not going to work and we're seeing that play out in Australia right now yeah yes so what has happened there like they they got kids under 16 allegedly can't go on social media and then they started

tracking what actually happened yeah so the Australian was the first country in the world to

ban social media for under 16s and this came after a whole you know they rushed it through after year actually actually after one of the wives of a politician read the anxious generation and this all went through very quickly and then all the politicians discovered they didn't know what social media was right so they had to make a list of social media platforms and what went on it they didn't have YouTube on it for example and it's the number one platform that the children

youth are on they ended up putting YouTube on it and in December 2025 when they kicked kids off the their platforms what happened is that all the under 16 still had access to YouTube 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”

a gigantic effects but here you know 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 percent are still on the platforms others are probably in less regulated spaces they decided that you know what you have to do is you have to violate the privacy rights of everybody to figure up who's 16 or not so it's not just a chance to have to upload their data it's all the adults

and 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 then they had the idea that they would use facial recognition to predict how old somebody is and so we both you know have teenagers and they went to middle school so can you imagine trying to go into a middle school and predict whether you know a 13-year-old is 11 versus you know something

look like they're 25 so yeah alright so there there are many problems that computer vision can solve and this is just not one of them so it turns out like they're probably about two years off

their face to these companies we haven't I been spending the last 10 years telling them not to do that

“well the next thing is meta is going to do it with bone structure now like that's a great idea”

isn't 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 drove mustache on their face in that work so it's clear that the companies are not actually trying that hard to stop this because those are those are problems the 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

“but I do think we've had some really sobering looks we're both with Australia and then this new”

evidence that's come out on the cell phone bands and school showing no effects on academic performance and attendance and bullying but she caused us to really pause and say is this how we want to be spending all of our policy effort time money is chasing you know these companies when there are very real you know spreads and issues and resources it could be directing towards young people okay so if I'm a parent and I'm like oh my god okay so but I thought that if I just say like no smart phone

until you're 16 or maybe you know I was psyched about these bands getting kids off of Instagram or wherever else if you're telling me that that's not the solution then what should I be doing because I am worried about my kids I see how much they want to be on their social media feeds or that they feel like they're missing out if they don't get to look at their phone yeah so

a couple things I would start to look at things outside of the phone first so when you think about

your child if you immediately think of the phone it's easy to get sucked into this negative narrative and fear but broad note and start to ask so is my child sleeping do they have friends do they seem happy right is there you know things that they're doing that they enjoy in their lives and those things aren't happening let's start to tackle what's happening there and let's start to think about whether not the phone might be playing a role in you know causing them to spend too much time and miss

out on opportunities for sports or to be together with friends and that's a more kind of productive place to be in in a moment more with child psychologist Candice Rogers on navigating parenting in this high-tech age which of course has to include a conversation about AI and chat bots I'm a new zomerotie and you're listening to the Ted radio hour from NPR stay with us you know every day on up first NPR's golden globe nominated morning news podcast we bring you three

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developmental psychologist Candace Rogers with a different take on kids tech and mental health so over the past few years many states have banned cell phones in public classrooms and currently more than 30 states and DC have some sort of restriction Candace who is the mother of two teams herself says that banning phones isn't necessarily going to help kids when the schools don't have

enough support systems for them in the first place just the ratio of counselors to students you know

“sits nationally about one to five hundred and that's just counselors I think a woman to health counselors”

were now up to about one and thirteen hundred so there's no way that any type of reasonable care or attention could be devoted with that kind of investment and but yet we're spending millions of dollars in fact I was 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 the yonder for people who don't know is the little pouches that kids put

their phones and when they get to school that supposedly locks it up for the day yes they locked them

up for the day but I was called at the office because she evoked her fourth amendment rights against

unreasonable search and seizure but you know I I say that I love your kid I I know I say this jokingly but this is actually one of the impacts of the ban so in Florida and in this a new study

“that was released also what they found was immediately up to the bands went up suspensions went up and in”

Florida it was against blocking brown students and so we know it's 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 coaches how do you respond 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 formal 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 yeah so people will assume I should clarify that I am not saying in any way that um that children should be on their phones and the phone should be on the desk dinging etc but that is that is nowhere where I'm going here but this was actually a problem that was largely solved so we might be kicking down a door that's already open so prior to this I had children going to the schools and spend a lot of time at school's collecting data there

was something at the back of the room maybe it was a shoe rack the students would put their phone

“in the back of it or they'd have their phones in their backpacks and so I think the real risk here”

is that we have these policies that go through policy makers can declare victory that they've done something but on the reality of it they haven't actually changed access to the phones because young people are circumventing the band or you know they were already limited in their access to begin with within school school hours but still they're declaring victory and that they've solved some sort of learning loss issue or it's a health problem and again it's that redirection

it's an opportunity cost where we should be focused on young people what they need instead we're investing all of our efforts in these policy solutions which don't seem to match you know the problem but again I mean I I'm married a teacher I support teachers on what they want and I think there is something to be said about teachers supporting the band and if we want to do that then we can make that argument 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 but it's going to improve learning that's going to reduce bullying that's going to help absenteeism and that is just you know a story that's being sold to distract us so if a social media band might make things worse what would make things better

so first we need to invest in the adults around children spending millions of dollars on

yonder coaches 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 teams to build the skills they need for the future so my colleagues Steven Schueler 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 to react 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

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

and coaching and parenting it still works with teams today tech has not changed that 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 ten years anyway and AI is the next thing and that kids are really really vulnerable chat bots 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 cause their kid to kill themselves it's a really serious situation

“and it sounds really really scary can this what's your take yeah i i think it is um i mean it”

is moved rapidly and it is disrupting all aspects of life and there's there are definitely

issues and real issues that we need to focus on with young people and so when i sit back i think you know what 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 today and i think we know a couple of things i think we know that young people are going to be early in enthusiastic adopters of any new technology and we're seeing that loud and clear

with artificial intelligence so they are gravitating towards these platforms are using them frequently the other thing we know is that tech companies cannot be trusted to put in guardrails that are

developmentally appropriate there is just too much money involved the incentives are not aligned

and so that creates you know at the toxic mix now the structural if we can get to the structural constraints and the penalties on tech companies then we might have some some movements so how 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 work force of the future right and what will

happen is if we ban AI in schools that all of the highest 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

“so i think it's going to be a really complicated and big tent issue to solve but if we go down”

the path that we have gone down with social media which is fear and ban we are going to end up in a very bad place. I mean amic totally i see my younger daughter who's 16 who will not touch AI she's been convinced that morally it is reprehensible where as i'm also seeing you know these 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 um so you know we're figuring it out is what it feels like yeah it sounds like your daughter my daughter we get along we both my husband i got a lecture the other day about the climate and which are real which is yes you know the climate damage of all these

“data centers but yeah it's going to be a challenge but i think that we do know that the first”

impulse will be the fear and bans and then there's there's the continuum right there's the people that show think that this will be the opportunity in terms of personalized education and the effects are very different for example in the global south right where we don't have enough teachers or enough room in the 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's really is the challenge of how to um realize these the potential of this with 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 researchers anytime in new technology rolls out it will amplify inequalities because

to use it in ways that one hands learning and you know prospects in the job market will do that

“right and so the 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 going to have even bigger gaps within education you know mental health and other things that we care about I do also want to ask you about my growing sense and I wonder if you would concur based on data that much of what we're talking about when we talk about rising anxiety, depression, inability to focus is also potentially simply because of what we're not doing when we're on

screens for a long time it's not necessarily the screens themselves but the fact that

sitting for long hours looking at a piece of glass means that we're not up and outside and talking

to people and getting fresh air and all the other things that the human body craves and need.

“Yes yes and yes and so we need to be moving our bodies our children need to be moving our bodies”

but again it's you know like it's easy to blame the phone for us just sitting here all day at the screen and it's harder to look at kind of ourselves of why didn't we go for that run this morning or why are we getting rid of facet and schools or why are we kicking teens out of skateboard parks where they're active and you know getting some some exercise and so it is one of these things where in the same way that we blamed the obesity epidemic on phones right that was for among

children that was increasing long before and we know that you know an American culture for sure sugary foods and drinks were a big part of that story that shutting down and reducing facet and schools was a big part of that and then it's highly stratified by social class right where children from high RSS families are in every kind of sports and activity and are moving a lot more and part of that is is money not motivation. 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. 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 he's like should I just say no you're too young and I said well I'm

“going to tell you what I think can this audience would say which is have you had a conversation”

with your son about you know the internet generally what's on there what's false information safe ideas of 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 you seem to find I was like I think can this would say like pick

your battles and maybe this isn't one of them how did I do can this you did great you know what I would 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 a time and time again that young people hide don't tell don't go to a trusted adult because their worried the adults will take the tech away and that now in retrospect seems obvious to me but I I needed the 13 year olds to tell me before I change my own parenting strategy 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 oh I mean they it is really actually

incredible to see the way that young people can creatively use digital technology they they're actually better in so many ways at silencing notifications of kind of creating their own feeds and this happens over time so it's very different when we talk to the young younger kids around 12 to 11 versus 15 or 16 when they're kind of veterans or experts at this and they have a lot to share in terms of teaching us 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 the car full of kids and I'm driving carpool is to just put out some question about tech and like how I should do it and they just

well I mean so I actually 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 the children that”

were impacted by this were far away we wanted to be there as a group and they were on Snapchat 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 because you're grown-ups that's true the kids do not want us in their spaces

well we weren't actually kicked off they 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 by writing like”

warm piece you know checking you know and everybody mothering so you know you just we you don't know the norm's right and they're just a sign that you know you're an old in the young space

and they they want their space they want to own their space and right now we're just we're just

coming in and taking away their spaces yeah 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

“that was Candace Rogers she is a developmental psychologist and professor at the University of”

California Irvine and at Duke University if you or someone you know maybe considering suicide or is in crisis please call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline this interview was done in partnership with the team at TED Talks Daily you can hear Candace's full talk and much more on the TED Talks Daily feed thank you so much for listening the episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and TED Talks Daily's Lucy Little with help from

Katie Montelione it was edited by Alison McAdam, Sana's mesh and poor and me our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Clutier, Avery Keatley, Fio Giren, Hirshanahada and James Delosy our executive producer is Irene Neguchi our audio engineer was Stacey Abbott our theme music was written by romteen Arab Louie our partners at TED are Salcon, Logan McLeard, Davda, Helen Walters, Roxanne Highlash and Danielle LaBella Reso. I'm Manush Zamorodi and you have been listening to the

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