What is Social Media Doing to Kids? with Dr. Jean Twenge

0:06Pushkin.

0:11Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Happy International Day of Happiness. The International Day of Happiness is a holiday established by the United Nations as a global day of recognition about the fundamental importance of human happiness. And on this day each year, the United Nations and its partners release the World Happiness Report, their annual snapshot of how happy people are around the globe. The report is also famous for ranking the happiest countries in the world. And this year, the happiest country is Finland for the ninth year in a row. So congratulations to Finland and all its lucky inhabitants.

0:47For a social science nerd like me, the World Happiness Report is an absolute treat. It brings leading researchers around the world together to dig into the political, social and economic forces that shape our well-being. Each new edition of the World Happiness Report centers around a different theme. And this year's theme feels especially relevant. If we're going to think about psychological well-being and happiness in the modern age, we have to look in depth at technology. This is Dr. Jean Twenge, one of the researchers behind this year's World Happiness Report. Jean is an internationally celebrated psychologist at San Diego State University.

1:24Her chapter looks at how young people around the world use and respond to social media. Jane is something of a rock star when it comes to understanding teens and technology. In fact, she was one of the first people to sound the alarm on how smartphones might be damaging adolescent mental health. The article in The Atlantic was an excerpt of my book iGen, which came out in August 2017. It was headlined, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? As you can imagine, people had some very strong reactions to this title. I always like to point out, number one, it's a question. And number two, I didn't write it because headlines are written by editors, not by the authors.

2:02And they're supposed to be clickbait, and it did its job. But the article itself was grounded in some pretty revolutionary data. It really came from what I was seeing in these big national surveys of teens. All of a sudden, around 2012, more and more teens started to say that they felt lonely, that they felt left out. That they felt like they couldn't do anything right. That their lives weren't useful. That they didn't enjoy life. And those last three are classic symptoms of depression. One of the things I find so harrowing about that article, reading it now, is that you had this sentence that young people might be, quote, on the brink of a mental health crisis.

2:39What has happened since that time? I mean, if you follow that metaphor through, if they were on the brink of a cliff, they fell off the cliff. But if our young people have fallen off the cliff, is there any way for them to climb back on top? Well, stay tuned, because in this episode, Gene and I will explore new data from around the world on how young people today are using social media, and what the latest research shows about how all of us can build healthier relationships with these platforms. The Happiness Lab will return right after some quick messages from our sponsors.

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6:05I was so excited to hear that psychologist Jean Twenge was part of the 2026 World Happiness Report. Jean's been a research hero of mine for a while, in large part because she was one of the very first researchers to call out the negative effects of smartphones on teen happiness. And then other folks started to notice this too. There was an article in Pediatrics about clinical level depression. suddenly going up around 2012, that emergency room admissions for self-harm were going up, that suicide rate was going up. So there was a lot of stuff going on with that turning point around 2012. And so what did you think was going on at first?

6:44I had no clue. I mean, really, it was a mystery. I just remember thinking, like, what's going wrong in the lives of teens at that point? And, you know, when you work with big data sets that go over time, And when you have one year of data, you always have to pause and go, OK, this could be a blip. It might go back to normal the next year. But it didn't. So then I started thinking more broadly. Well, could it be the economy? That's always kind of the first place that you have to go. It was clearly not the economy. Those of us who lived through the Great Recession know how bad that got. But it was finally, finally over by 2012.

7:18And things were getting better in the U.S. economy. It was a mystery. But at the same time that I started to notice these trends, I'd been working on a few other projects with these surveys and noticed that around that same turning point in 2012, teens also started to sleep less. And maybe even more crucially, teens and young adults are spending less time hanging out with their friends, going to parties, just getting together with friends informally and socializing. All of it was going down. And I thought about all of those things. You know, we have depression going up. We have less time with friends in person, less time sleeping.

7:52What might possibly explain that? And then I saw Pew Research had data on ownership of smartphones. And it turns out that the ownership of smartphones among Americans passed 50 % around the end of 2012. And that started to coalesce into a theory that it was the rise of smartphones, the rise of social media that might explain these stress. Did we know about the mechanisms, how technology might be affecting kids' mental health? I mean, I had that theory about displacing sleep and displacing in-person social interaction with friends. So that seemed like one very clear mechanism. But we didn't know as much, I think, at the time about some of the other mechanisms.

8:40But even back then, people were certainly talking about, hey, there's this competition for likes and followers. There's the body image problems cropping up on Instagram, that people are behaving compulsively when it comes to their phones and social media. We didn't know all the ins and outs of that, but teens knew. That's what I also think is really interesting is when I first started to give talks on this in 2017, 2018, I was really afraid that the teens in my audience would be like, you're old, you don't know anything. This stuff is fine. We love it. And that's not even close to what happened.

9:18It's so interesting in part because those were the early days of some of these technologies. You know, that was like old school Instagram. That wasn't like reels and all the stuff that sucks them and even more. Yeah, exactly. So give the listeners a sense of just how bad the statistics are these days. Clinical level depression among teens doubled between 2011 and 2019. Before the pandemic was on the scene, that's how big the problem already was. But it's pretty common to see, especially for depression and anxiety, heavy users of social media are usually somewhere between 50 % and 200 % more likely to some kind of criteria for clinically significant depression or high depression.

9:57And so now that you've been studying this connection for so long, what are some of the new things that we've learned? We just have a lot more data from a lot more sources now. When I wrote iGen, there were really, as far as I knew, only three experimental studies on social media reduction or abstinence and then looking at outcomes. Just in the last year, we've had several meta-analyses come out because there's now so many social media reduction experiments. So these meta-analyses are big studies of studies where not only do we have more experimental studies, you put all the experimental studies together statistically and ask what's going on.

10:32Exactly. So the two most recent ones that came out in 2025 both show a significant reduction in depression and then a significant increase in psychological well-being, so happiness, life satisfaction, those types of measures when people give up or cut back on social media, especially if they do that for three weeks or more. What's interesting, though, is you can't exactly really ethically do kind of the ideal experiment in this area, which would be to randomly assign a bunch of 12-year-olds to spend eight hours a day on social media, not really ethical. And even doing that with 22-year-olds would probably not be ethical.

11:11So that's why most of the studies have focused on kind of the opposite premise of giving up or reducing social media. By definition, what those studies are doing is taking people from the average use of social media to light. And this, I think, is an opportunity for future research because that's not where the action is in the correlational data. Not even close. It's the heavy users, where you really see high rates of depression and unhappiness. So I'm hoping there'll be a study that will take the heavy users and try to get them to cut back. I mean, that might be a little bit of a challenge, but I would expect you to see even bigger effect sizes there.

11:50Another thing I know you've talked a lot about is this idea that we need better data when it comes to cross-cultural social media use. And that's where this new World Happiness Report fits in. And so before you started the World Happiness Report, what were some of the open questions that you wanted to look at with this new data set? So this is the PISA data set. PISA stands for the Program for International Student Assessment. Its primary purpose is to look at academic performance in math, reading, and science. And it's of teenagers, so it looks at 15 and 16 year olds in countries around the world, somewhere between 30 and 40, depending on what measures you're using.

12:27And we know from international data sets, including PISA, that there's been an increase over the years in the number of adolescents who say that they're lonely, in the number of adolescents who say that they have psychological difficulties like anxiety. But what hasn't been as present is those international data sets asking about hours per day spent on social media, and then also having some other measure of mental health or psychological well-being. And so the 2022 administration of PISA does that. So you had the PISA data set from 2022. What did you find? So for girls around the world, there's a significant link between spending a lot of universal across the different regions.

13:23It was strongest in English-speaking countries and Western Europe. In Western Europe, for girls, heavy users were 63 % more likely to report low life satisfaction than light users. In Asia, they were 46 % more likely. Overall, the average across the world, 49 % more likely. So, so far, the PISA data lines up with the idea that very heavy social media use isn't great for teen girls' well-being. In the report, heavy use meant spending about five hours or more a day on social media. But when Jean looked beyond girls, the story started to get a little more complicated. For boys, it was a little bit more of a mixed picture.

14:03You do see a link, especially again in the UK and Western Europe, that spending more time on social media is linked to lower life satisfaction. But that wasn't universal. In some regions, we don't see much of an effect at all. For girls, it seems to have a bigger impact on their happiness, their life satisfaction, their body image, everything compared to boys. But the strangest results came from the boys who were the heaviest users of social media. Think seven plus hours a day on these platforms. There were some surprises in here, especially in the data for boys. The heaviest users of social media also were a little bit more likely to say that they had the highest life satisfaction.

14:44So choosing a 10 on the zero to 10 scale, that was a mystery that I'm still trying to figure out. Danny Blanchflower, who's an economist at Dartmouth, has worked with PISA. He noticed that, especially for boys and especially in the non-English speaking countries, that those who are choosing a 10 on life satisfaction also had very low standardized test scores. Maybe there's a reading comprehension problem. There's something going on there that, I don't know, we're still trying to figure out. Another interesting thing you saw in the World Happiness Report data, as I understand it, is there was this little slight bump in life satisfaction when teens were on social media just a little bit.

15:24What was that about? Yeah. So for girls, for example, is where we really see this pattern across most of the regions. those who said that they used social media for less than an hour a day had the highest mean life satisfaction. It could be that, yeah, if you're using social media in that limited way, maybe you're just communicating with your friends a little bit, seeing a couple of funny videos and then getting off. But it's such an interesting pattern because the mean life satisfaction is a little lower for the non-users of social media. But at least for girls, we also see in most regions that those who didn't use social media at all were the most likely to have that very high life satisfaction, choosing a 10 on the 0 to 10 scale.

16:08So to clarify, on average, the happiest girls were the light users of social media, the ones spending less than an hour a day on these platforms. But when Jean looked at the teens reporting the very highest life satisfaction, that perfect 10 out of 10, those tended to be the girls who said they didn't use social media at all. So it's a little more complex than some of the other studies on this topic. Across the world, the report showed that minus a few puzzling exceptions, heavy use of social media is really not great for young people's well-being. Which means that if we really care about teen happiness, we should find ways to limit their time on these platforms to less than an hour a day.

16:47But how on earth do you do that in a world where these tools have become completely ubiquitous forms of social connection and entertainment? We'll be back with Jean's answer to that when The Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.

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20:57When psychologist Jean Twenge first began researching the connection between social media and teen mental health, it was mostly an academic question. But over time, this issue has become much more personal, both for her and for the three daughters she's been raising. It's this family challenge that Jean discusses in her most recent book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. So in 2016, when I was working on that research, they were nine, six, and four. And now they're 19, 16, and 14. So it seems like the adolescents you are studying have turned into adolescents that are in your own life and in your own home and who have their own technology struggles in your house.

21:39Yeah. What's that been like? It's been interesting. I mean, pretty much everybody I know who's a kid over the age of about five and many with toddlers, too, are struggling with this. And I think it becomes especially hard, you know, late elementary school, when more kids start to get smartphones, when more kids end up having school laptops and then middle school hits. And then the smartphone seems to become almost the norm. And so does the school laptop and the devices are multiplying and it just becomes really hard. So the collision of my research life and my life as a mom trying to figure out how to stem this tide and how to make the best choices for my own family resulted in the 10 rules book.

22:23I was frustrated because so much of the advice that was out there, whether it was online or in other books or other experts talking about it interviews, it was squishy. Like what age should a child get a smartphone? It was, it depends. So I've been asked that for 10 years. when I first got asked that, I'm like, they're in the headlights. I have no idea. So I kind of went back to the, it depends. And then I realized at some point, that's actually horrible advice. Can you imagine having this discussion with your 12-year-old? We'll do this when you're ready. We'll do this when you're the most mature.

22:55They're going to bug you every minute of every day, try to convince you that they're ready and they're mature and so on. You need to draw a line in the sand like we do for alcohol and driving and everything else with teenagers. Let's choose an age and run with it because that's easier. If you do like we ended up doing in my house, you get your first smartphone with your driver's license, then that's it. It's a line in the sand. It's done. Conversation's over. Why is the driver's license so key there? So giving kids real world freedom, the ability to get around on their own, which is another huge generational change that kids and teens don't have as much independence as they used to.

23:37High school seniors are a lot less likely to have their driver's license now than they were in the 80s, for example. And I like tying the driver's license to the smartphone because, you know, first, smartphone's a tool. It's useful when you start driving. I like the Maps app. It's good to have that. But it's also then, it's not the choice that so many teens have of, well, I don't have that license. I don't have a way to get around. I really want to spend time with my friends. Mom and dad are busy. They can't drive me. So let's just go on Snapchat. So if the smartphone's with the driver's license, then you don't have that false choice.

24:15Then it's, I can get in that car and go do something with my friends. It also gets the kids who are a little reluctant to get their driver's license, getting their driver's license, which is awesome. Exactly. And I know that because that's my 16-year-old. I don't think she would be motivated to get that license if it wasn't for it being tied to the phone. So interesting. In a big city, you can modify that. If it gets at least 16 and getting around the city, you know, on public transportation. I live out in the suburbs, so it's the driver's license here. But in the middle of New York, it would be different.

24:42And as you point out, as a society, we do this for so many other things. When are they going to vote? When can they join the military? When can they drive? We have rules about this. And that's one of the first things that you talk about in your book, why it's called 10 Rules, is that you argue that we need rules, not just conversations. I always want to say from the outset, we should have the conversations too. I have a list of things you should talk to your kid about in terms of online safety and everything else. But they're not enough. They're not enough against the peer pressure, the billions of dollars that social media companies import into algorithms.