Kids These Days: The Data on Whether Screens Really Are Ruining Childhood
Paul Bloom weighs the evidence on whether today's youth are better or worse off than previous generations. He cites improvements in safety, tolerance, and parental time, but also rising anxiety and depression. The debate over social media's impact is unresolved: correlational studies show small or negligible effects, while experiments often find none. Bloom suggests screens may harm via collective action problems—kids are trapped by peers' usage—and notes that suicide rates have actually declined since 2017, complicating the crisis narrative.
It's possible that teenagers would be better off if social media didn't exist, but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.
- cjs_ac
One observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different problem.
- xg15
I feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking.
"Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."
- usernametaken29
I think one aspect that wasn’t discussed in this article sufficiently is:
> given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.
Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media.
I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake.
In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years.
Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.
- II2II
When people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.
- TFNA
This bit strikes me as rather stuck in the past and oblivious to 2026:
"the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."
That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.
It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.