Dr. Gray, I appreciate your expertise and perspective on this topic! I think, as with most topics, that this is a very nuanced and complex topic. I started my career in the late 90’s as an SLP working with young children. At the time, I felt myself advocating for more free play and feeling frustrated by the academic demands that were not developmentally appropriate being forced on young kids. I then moved to working with middle school and high school students in the mid 2000’s. The introduction of social media definitely had an impact on the social world within schools.
But something else was also happening at that time. Schools were moving away from traditional teaching methods to ones that were more computer based. Since the start of the pandemic, this shift has escalated and most curriculums used in schools today are primarily digitally based. For the most part, kids spend the majority of their days in school. I agree with your previous letter (D8) which discusses your thoughts on the multiple causes for the negative mental health trend in youth. I think social media has played a large role but also the changes to education and the significant increase in screen time during the school day is also a big contributor. I encourage all your readers to check out your Letgrow.org website along with everyschool.org if they want to help advocate to make a change!
Excellent post, Peter. My anecdotal experiences with numerous young people who presented with anxiety, depression, or suicidal attempts or ideation showed that they did indeed spend inordinate amounts of time on social media, and it would be easy to blame the social media usage for their mental health struggles. But I found that social media use for these young people was more of an escape from trauma, or their attempts to navigate beyond the constraints of what they feel is the unfree and unjust world that they live in. As far as causal relationships it seemed that mental health struggles led to an increased attachment to social media, not the other way around. But an outsider would see the correlation and just assume that the relationship went the other way.
To be fair, I think that social media presents more of a problem to most young people (and adults) than benefits. I think that it does a fabulous job (commercially) capturing the attention of people, enabling a mindset that encourages people to constantly measure themselves against others, and hardwires a perceived need for external validation through dopamine hits. But to blame social media and dismiss concerns about a lack of social connection because young people's time and freedom of movement is tightly regulated, or the constant pressure of performing for adults academically and athletically with the threat of a life of poverty hanging over their head, or an inability to imagine that they are able to make meaningful life decisions for themselves to shape their own future seems to me to be a desire to identify a boogie man. As you suggested, it is a lot easier to name a boogie man (e.g., violent video games, rock music, drugs) than to address the social conditions of society.
BTW, I found a substack of someone who has a couple of really nice posts questioning this narrative around phones and social media, as well. https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/
Thank you for these thoughts, Antonio. As I said, I do recognize that social media can hurt as well as help. In my Letter D7,--https://petergray.substack.com/p/benefits-and-challenges-of-social-- I ended with a section on common sense suggestions for minimizing harmful effects of social media. It would be interesting to collect more thoughts on this. I think a goal should be to teach safe ways to use social media, not ban it, just as we should teach children safe ways to play outdoors without adults, not ban them from doing so.
I agree, banning it is counterproductive. I support parents and educators modeling intentional use of social media, and being honest about potential pitfalls, and allowing young people to struggle through their own experiences with lots of support. One, it’s not like adults can really prevent kids from getting on social media these days unless they are excessively controlling. And two, similar to other potential vices, attempting to deny access now risks even worse situations with more dire consequences when the kids are no longer under the thumb of their parents.
Are you familiar with the book Glued to Games by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan from 2011? They used Self-Determination Theory as a means of countering the "addiction" to games idea. In oder to be properly classified as an addiction there has to be a causal link between the supposed addiction and the dysfunctions of concern. When levels of primary need satisfaction (or lack thereof) are controlled for then the causal links are broken. In other words teens that appear to be addicted are using games to meet their needs. When their needs are met in other ways the dysfunctions go away. (Thus implicitly indicting the other elements of their environments for being inadequately supportive of those needs.)
My point is that SDT provides a model for explaining how and why teens are using the technology independent of the positive or negative consequences that follow from that use.
Great to see some happy numbers :) And love the practical advise in the D7 article.
And it always good to be reminded that the worst enemy of children's free play isn't Social platform, which support free expression. But it's academic presure in coercive schools and sports, as you so beautifully scapegoated in Free to Learn. Lovely book.
I agree with your optimism, as long as we hold on to our kids, as Gordon Neufeld argues. And give them values of enlightenment now, as Steven Pinker argues. (The Palestine propaganda scare me.)
So my fear is, that we are loosing our connection to our kids. School is no doubt the biggest cause of this genarational isolation. But at least we ate dinner together once. Now we stare at our phones.
What if the smartphone give kids at risk the final push over the edge. Then the effect will be very big in vulnerable families. But very low, if the child-adult relationships are strong.
Do your studies control for the strength of child-adult relationships? I hope so. :)
I vaguely remember that Robert Putnam also argue for the importance of dinner conversations in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. But not sure.
What is the minimum of time you'll need to spend with your kids to immunize them against mind parasites, as Gad Saad would put it. And have you read his book The Parasitic Mind. Maybe you think he, together with Haidt, is exaggerating the dangers of the woke-culture?
"I fear that, to a considerable degree, we as a society are scapegoating social media because we lack the courage to confront the real causes and make the social changes we should be making."
I believe this is the unspoken part of many efforts to put the blame on *anything* other than root causes. We were once told that books would corrupt the soul; then radio; and television; and the internet; and there will always be something. And yet depression, dissatisfaction and angst have been part of the human equation since its beginning.
Many youth challenges driven by communications technologies can be observed and addressed (without becoming a globe-spanning pandemic); and one way to do it would actually be by USING such tools as social media as a helpful tool. While many people have thrown up their hands at social media as a root of negativity, I have found it invaluable for my source of positive interactions, support, engagement and growth. Like anything, it's who you connect with and how you use it.
Which leads us back to the fuller circle: Today's youth may not be getting the formative lessons they need - in reasoning, critical thinking, self-assuredness, and optimism - that is necessary to deal with the negative sides of social media (or TV, or newspapers or politicians for that matter). Those lessons come from far more pervasive institutions - the family unit, neighborhoods, educational systems, and public discourse. All of which have been increasingly and absurdly apocalyptic over the last twenty years.
If you want to know why some teens may be more depressed than others, spend a week listening to who's telling them they're doomed, the planet is doomed, the economy is rigged, the system is against them, and so on. You'll find those voices in far more places - sadly - than just on their little phone screens.
Thank you for this, Dr. Gray. I appreciate your efforts to distill what we know and do not know. And you may be right that there has been cherry picking in the international data. Even though you yourself now linked to articles showing that at least 8 (I think) of the world's most tech savvy nations showed a very drastic change of mental health to the worst in exactly the same groups at exactly the same year, which seems to suggest that there may be an international explanation after all.
An important distinction here, I think, is that what I believe most scholars and institutions are arguing against is NOT "internet" or "technology". Internet and technology is a lot of entirely different things that we can't be for or against. Just as it isn't reasonable to be fully for or against chemicals. What Surgeon General and others are warning for is specifically social media and teens girls. That is things like Instagram and TikTok, but not games or Whatsapp or Netflix. In my opinion, citing reports on the fact that internet use in general isn't connected to to mental health problems isn't debunking this. In the total internet use, there are lots of things that aren't social media (Netflix, games, Whatsapp and other messinging services where your experience is decided by what your friends say and not profit driven algorithms, porn, a lot of work etc.).
It would be interesting to instead hear your comments on some of the many reports that study precisely social media and teens and do find a connections, like this cohort study on 10 000 14 olds in UK: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31193561/ ... showing that for girls, the likelihood of depression increases with 13% for every hour of social media use. (And in Sweden, 3 hours a day or more is very common according to latest data).
I’ve really enjoyed reading these series of letters. My 12 yo experimented with social media least year due to peer pressure but thankfully can’t see the point of it and has decided not to bother. On the flip side, my 9 yo struggled with school pressure to the point he has suicidal ideation and watching non-demanding videos on YouTube helped him forget his struggles for a while. We monitor what he watches and encourage him to use other, more easily regulated videos and games, but recognise that, for him, this is an escape when the world gets too hard for him to cope. I can’t comment for teenagers in general, but I wonder how much social media has become the ‘in thing’ to be involved or be ostracised that smoking was when I was a teen? It seems from your research roundup that, although there is going to be peer pressure to engage in social media, our current teens are more savvy about getting what they want from it than we adults are!
“I fear that, to a considerable degree, we as a society are scapegoating social media because we lack the courage to confront the real causes and make the social changes we should be making.” Amen to that.
> Our analyses used 4,200 yearly Internet percentages and 2,466 broadband-subscription rates.
is this the same thing as smart phone use with the kinds of algorithm driven social media app usage? It seems it could be a proxy for that given how most internet access is via phones but still seems a bit muddy that the usage is consistent with the kind that is claimed to cause harm.
Yes, it would be better if international data were available on the rise of use of specific social media sites, but it does appear that teens everywhere glom on to social media use as soon as the technology is available to them. So I think the proxy is pretty good.
Dr. Gray, I appreciate your expertise and perspective on this topic! I think, as with most topics, that this is a very nuanced and complex topic. I started my career in the late 90’s as an SLP working with young children. At the time, I felt myself advocating for more free play and feeling frustrated by the academic demands that were not developmentally appropriate being forced on young kids. I then moved to working with middle school and high school students in the mid 2000’s. The introduction of social media definitely had an impact on the social world within schools.
But something else was also happening at that time. Schools were moving away from traditional teaching methods to ones that were more computer based. Since the start of the pandemic, this shift has escalated and most curriculums used in schools today are primarily digitally based. For the most part, kids spend the majority of their days in school. I agree with your previous letter (D8) which discusses your thoughts on the multiple causes for the negative mental health trend in youth. I think social media has played a large role but also the changes to education and the significant increase in screen time during the school day is also a big contributor. I encourage all your readers to check out your Letgrow.org website along with everyschool.org if they want to help advocate to make a change!
Excellent post, Peter. My anecdotal experiences with numerous young people who presented with anxiety, depression, or suicidal attempts or ideation showed that they did indeed spend inordinate amounts of time on social media, and it would be easy to blame the social media usage for their mental health struggles. But I found that social media use for these young people was more of an escape from trauma, or their attempts to navigate beyond the constraints of what they feel is the unfree and unjust world that they live in. As far as causal relationships it seemed that mental health struggles led to an increased attachment to social media, not the other way around. But an outsider would see the correlation and just assume that the relationship went the other way.
To be fair, I think that social media presents more of a problem to most young people (and adults) than benefits. I think that it does a fabulous job (commercially) capturing the attention of people, enabling a mindset that encourages people to constantly measure themselves against others, and hardwires a perceived need for external validation through dopamine hits. But to blame social media and dismiss concerns about a lack of social connection because young people's time and freedom of movement is tightly regulated, or the constant pressure of performing for adults academically and athletically with the threat of a life of poverty hanging over their head, or an inability to imagine that they are able to make meaningful life decisions for themselves to shape their own future seems to me to be a desire to identify a boogie man. As you suggested, it is a lot easier to name a boogie man (e.g., violent video games, rock music, drugs) than to address the social conditions of society.
BTW, I found a substack of someone who has a couple of really nice posts questioning this narrative around phones and social media, as well. https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/
Thank you for these thoughts, Antonio. As I said, I do recognize that social media can hurt as well as help. In my Letter D7,--https://petergray.substack.com/p/benefits-and-challenges-of-social-- I ended with a section on common sense suggestions for minimizing harmful effects of social media. It would be interesting to collect more thoughts on this. I think a goal should be to teach safe ways to use social media, not ban it, just as we should teach children safe ways to play outdoors without adults, not ban them from doing so.
I agree, banning it is counterproductive. I support parents and educators modeling intentional use of social media, and being honest about potential pitfalls, and allowing young people to struggle through their own experiences with lots of support. One, it’s not like adults can really prevent kids from getting on social media these days unless they are excessively controlling. And two, similar to other potential vices, attempting to deny access now risks even worse situations with more dire consequences when the kids are no longer under the thumb of their parents.
Are you familiar with the book Glued to Games by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan from 2011? They used Self-Determination Theory as a means of countering the "addiction" to games idea. In oder to be properly classified as an addiction there has to be a causal link between the supposed addiction and the dysfunctions of concern. When levels of primary need satisfaction (or lack thereof) are controlled for then the causal links are broken. In other words teens that appear to be addicted are using games to meet their needs. When their needs are met in other ways the dysfunctions go away. (Thus implicitly indicting the other elements of their environments for being inadequately supportive of those needs.)
My point is that SDT provides a model for explaining how and why teens are using the technology independent of the positive or negative consequences that follow from that use.
Yes, in fact I have quoted this research in one or more articles I've written on why teens are so attracted to games.
Great to see some happy numbers :) And love the practical advise in the D7 article.
And it always good to be reminded that the worst enemy of children's free play isn't Social platform, which support free expression. But it's academic presure in coercive schools and sports, as you so beautifully scapegoated in Free to Learn. Lovely book.
I agree with your optimism, as long as we hold on to our kids, as Gordon Neufeld argues. And give them values of enlightenment now, as Steven Pinker argues. (The Palestine propaganda scare me.)
So my fear is, that we are loosing our connection to our kids. School is no doubt the biggest cause of this genarational isolation. But at least we ate dinner together once. Now we stare at our phones.
What if the smartphone give kids at risk the final push over the edge. Then the effect will be very big in vulnerable families. But very low, if the child-adult relationships are strong.
Do your studies control for the strength of child-adult relationships? I hope so. :)
Thanks for this comment, Jakob. One bit of research showing the importance of real family connections comes from studies of kids' adaptations during the pandemic, when schools were closed. At least two studies showed that kids' mental health improved during this time, in part, according to them, because they felt closer to their parents. See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202102/pandemic-lesson-family-togetherness-makes-children-happy
I vaguely remember that Robert Putnam also argue for the importance of dinner conversations in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. But not sure.
What is the minimum of time you'll need to spend with your kids to immunize them against mind parasites, as Gad Saad would put it. And have you read his book The Parasitic Mind. Maybe you think he, together with Haidt, is exaggerating the dangers of the woke-culture?
"I fear that, to a considerable degree, we as a society are scapegoating social media because we lack the courage to confront the real causes and make the social changes we should be making."
I believe this is the unspoken part of many efforts to put the blame on *anything* other than root causes. We were once told that books would corrupt the soul; then radio; and television; and the internet; and there will always be something. And yet depression, dissatisfaction and angst have been part of the human equation since its beginning.
Many youth challenges driven by communications technologies can be observed and addressed (without becoming a globe-spanning pandemic); and one way to do it would actually be by USING such tools as social media as a helpful tool. While many people have thrown up their hands at social media as a root of negativity, I have found it invaluable for my source of positive interactions, support, engagement and growth. Like anything, it's who you connect with and how you use it.
Which leads us back to the fuller circle: Today's youth may not be getting the formative lessons they need - in reasoning, critical thinking, self-assuredness, and optimism - that is necessary to deal with the negative sides of social media (or TV, or newspapers or politicians for that matter). Those lessons come from far more pervasive institutions - the family unit, neighborhoods, educational systems, and public discourse. All of which have been increasingly and absurdly apocalyptic over the last twenty years.
If you want to know why some teens may be more depressed than others, spend a week listening to who's telling them they're doomed, the planet is doomed, the economy is rigged, the system is against them, and so on. You'll find those voices in far more places - sadly - than just on their little phone screens.
Thanks for your writing, sir. I appreciate it.
Thank you for this, Dr. Gray. I appreciate your efforts to distill what we know and do not know. And you may be right that there has been cherry picking in the international data. Even though you yourself now linked to articles showing that at least 8 (I think) of the world's most tech savvy nations showed a very drastic change of mental health to the worst in exactly the same groups at exactly the same year, which seems to suggest that there may be an international explanation after all.
An important distinction here, I think, is that what I believe most scholars and institutions are arguing against is NOT "internet" or "technology". Internet and technology is a lot of entirely different things that we can't be for or against. Just as it isn't reasonable to be fully for or against chemicals. What Surgeon General and others are warning for is specifically social media and teens girls. That is things like Instagram and TikTok, but not games or Whatsapp or Netflix. In my opinion, citing reports on the fact that internet use in general isn't connected to to mental health problems isn't debunking this. In the total internet use, there are lots of things that aren't social media (Netflix, games, Whatsapp and other messinging services where your experience is decided by what your friends say and not profit driven algorithms, porn, a lot of work etc.).
It would be interesting to instead hear your comments on some of the many reports that study precisely social media and teens and do find a connections, like this cohort study on 10 000 14 olds in UK: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31193561/ ... showing that for girls, the likelihood of depression increases with 13% for every hour of social media use. (And in Sweden, 3 hours a day or more is very common according to latest data).
I’ve really enjoyed reading these series of letters. My 12 yo experimented with social media least year due to peer pressure but thankfully can’t see the point of it and has decided not to bother. On the flip side, my 9 yo struggled with school pressure to the point he has suicidal ideation and watching non-demanding videos on YouTube helped him forget his struggles for a while. We monitor what he watches and encourage him to use other, more easily regulated videos and games, but recognise that, for him, this is an escape when the world gets too hard for him to cope. I can’t comment for teenagers in general, but I wonder how much social media has become the ‘in thing’ to be involved or be ostracised that smoking was when I was a teen? It seems from your research roundup that, although there is going to be peer pressure to engage in social media, our current teens are more savvy about getting what they want from it than we adults are!
“I fear that, to a considerable degree, we as a society are scapegoating social media because we lack the courage to confront the real causes and make the social changes we should be making.” Amen to that.
From the study
> Our analyses used 4,200 yearly Internet percentages and 2,466 broadband-subscription rates.
is this the same thing as smart phone use with the kinds of algorithm driven social media app usage? It seems it could be a proxy for that given how most internet access is via phones but still seems a bit muddy that the usage is consistent with the kind that is claimed to cause harm.
Yes, it would be better if international data were available on the rise of use of specific social media sites, but it does appear that teens everywhere glom on to social media use as soon as the technology is available to them. So I think the proxy is pretty good.