Is social media driving teen mental health issues?

0:02Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of asking what's up with kids these days. I'm Lauren Feiner, The Verge's senior policy reporter. For years now, parents, policymakers, and educators have been looking for the source of a large decline in teens' mental health beginning in 2010. In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt provided a neat answer in his New York Times bestseller, The Anxious Generation. The culprit? Smartphones and social media. But Boston College psychology research professor Peter Gray has a different explanation. In his new book, Restoring Childhood, Gray develops a competing theory.

0:37It posits that nationwide education standards implemented through the Common Core curriculum put increased pressure on kids at a time when even sports were becoming less about play and more about getting into college. On top of that, Gray says the adoption of the internet in the 90s and 2000s may actually be credited with the decline in teen suicide rates at that time. I wanted to talk with Gray to hear more about his theory and whether he thinks it can actually break through at a time when so many have already bought into heights. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 15th, 2026.

1:11John Higgins reviewed the new AirPods 5 with wireless charging case. He says they're the best non-pro earbuds Apple has made. At$149, they're somehow cheaper than the last generation's AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation. And Apple added volume controls to the stems, the same ones the AirPods Pro have. The main drawback, battery life has gone down. John also says to skip the cheaper 129 AirPods 5, which don't come with the wireless charging case. Staying on Apple, Apple TV cleaned up at the Emmys last night. The horror comedy Widow's Bay swept in its categories. It won Best Comedy and broke the record for most Emmys won by a comedy in one year.

1:54In all, Apple TV won 28 Emmys this year, more than any other outlet. New CEO John Ternus was there to celebrate, and to casually show off his iPhone duo on the red carpet. Finally, the street photographer behind all the gear, no skill, tested out the Dyson camera jet recently. You might recall the lens on this device is attached to a toothbrush. Based on the photos, it may be better suited for close-range images of your teeth rather than a landscape. You could read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. Labor Day savings are happening now at The Home Depot with select appliances starting at$399.

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3:09Woo! And the super athletic-ish stuff. Like fishing gear for chilling by the creek. Nice cast. Fitness apparel to push for higher reps. You got this. and golf balls priced so you can afford to lose one. Or a few. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes.

3:49It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. Peter Gray, welcome to The Verge Cast.

4:03Peter Gray:I'm very happy to be here. We're happy to have you. I recently finished your new book, Restoring Childhood, and I found it really interesting and I think provides a really interesting counter narrative to the one out there about smartphones and social media. So I wanted to start with having you lay out the theory you explain in your book about what's driving the increase in teen mental health issues that we've seen since 2010. So could you walk me briefly through what you believe led to the rise and fall of depression and anxiety since the 1950s for teens? If you look at suicide rates for teenagers, they increased steadily between 1950 and 1990.

4:56Peter Gray:A large increase, about a fourfold increase in suicide rates. The advantage of looking at suicide rates is it's a consistent measure. over time, there have not been completely consistent measures of anxiety and depression. But to the degree that you can piece together the measures that have been done, you would find the same chart. You would find the same kind of an increase. In fact, by at least some estimates are that the increase in rates of what today would be called major depressive disorder or clinically significant anxiety disorder are somewhere where between five and tenfold increases over that time.

5:38Peter Gray:So a huge increase in mental disorder problems among teenagers, high school-age teenagers, between the 1950s and 1990s. Then, very interestingly, and most people are not aware of this, things got better for a while. Between 1990 and about 2012 or so, rates of anxiety, depression, suicide declined. If you look at the suicide chart, it went all the way back, not back to 1950s levels, but about 40 % of the way back. Things got better. Then they kind of leveled off for a few years. And then beginning in 2010, the rates of suicide, anxiety, depression again increased rather rapidly all the way back up to 1990s levels.

6:32Peter Gray:What happened between 1950 and 1990? In one of my chapters, I describe 11 or 12 societal changes that occurred in that time, all of which would have the effect of restricting children's freedom to play and explore with other children away from adults. And I make the case that the ability to play and explore and do other things independently of direct adult control is very important for the development of mental health among young people. Young people are designed biologically to play and explore independently of adults. This is how they grow up. This is how they gradually become more and more independent of their parents.

7:30Peter Gray:And if you frustrate that drive, that's, first of all, those are the things that make kids happy. So you're taking away an immediate source of happiness. But secondly, you're depriving them of the opportunity to learn that they can take control of their own lives. If we've always got adults around who are solving their problems, telling them what to do, and so on and so forth, But they're not acquiring this sense of agency or what psychologists call an internal locus of control, the sense that I can solve problems. I can take charge of my own life. And there's a lot of research evidence that if you don't acquire that sense, then that sets you up for anxiety and depression.

8:15Peter Gray:You're kind of afraid of the world if you haven't figured out that you can deal with the bumps in the road of life because you've had the opportunity to do so. But then what happened in 1990, my argument is that what happened is the computer. The 90s was the era of the computer, the home computer revolution. By the early 1990s, most families in the United States that had a teenager also had a home computer. And by the end of the 1990s, even by the middle of the 1990s, Most families with a teenager not only had a computer, but they had an internet connection. And teenagers glommed on to this. They were the ones in households that learned how to use it.

9:02Peter Gray:They taught their parents how to use it. They were playing video games. They were communicating with early forms of what we now call social media with one another. So they had already, by 1990, been more or less deprived of the opportunity to get together in physical space and play and explore and do the things that kids need to do. But now they had a new way to do it. They could do it online. And they could get away from their parents because their parents didn't understand this thing as much as the kids did. So that's my argument. But it also gave, especially teenagers, a new status because in so many households, the teenager was the computer guru.

9:48Peter Gray:They were the ones who figured it out and kind of taught their parents how to use it. So my suggestion is that this was, I've looked at other possible explanations and none of them work. And this one really does work. There's actually a lot of evidence from studies done at that time in the 1990s that showed that those teenagers who had access to a home computer, other things being equal, such as socioeconomic class, were doing better psychologically than those that didn't have access to a computer. So that's one of several lines of evidence supporting this argument. Before we move on to 2010, can you address what were some of the other possible explanations you looked for for that rebound in mental health in the 90s?

10:37Peter Gray:Yeah, the only other one that made any sense at all to me, the only one worth talking about, I think, is the possibility that around 1990 was when SSRI inhibitors, the drugs like Prozac, were beginning to use with teenagers to treat anxiety. So conceivably, one person, the only published article I could find that even acknowledged that things got better at that time suggested it might be because SSRIs were beginning to be used with teenagers. So I looked up the data and I found data on the degree to which such prescriptions were being made, on the effectiveness of these drugs. And as I explain in the book, if people are interested in the details of it, there's no way that could explain it.

11:36Peter Gray:There just weren't enough kids taking it, and there's not enough evidence that they were that effective. In fact, the immediate effect of SSRI drugs is to actually slightly increase the chance of suicide. And that was one of the reasons that there was some constraint later on in prescribing them to teenagers. So that was the only other explanation that made any sense. You know, there is talk about, in some sense, it was a time when the economy was doing a little bit better than it had been before and that it was after. But again, I just couldn't find very good evidence that that would account for it.

12:24Yeah. So let's move on to what happened after 2010. And, you know, this is kind of the crux of some of the debate that you have with another prominent psychologist, which we'll get into. But can you walk me through your theory of what happened after 2010? And I know it has to do with the Common Core curriculum. So could you explain what that is?

12:50Peter Gray:So as many people know, the federal government adopted a law actually called No Child Left Behind, which was to create change in school systems to make schools more accountable, where schools were supposed to, in one way or another, prove that students were improving their learning in order to justify getting federal aid for the schools. But that bill, that act, or law actually never really had teeth until about 2010. What happened sometime between 2000 and 2010 was that states got together and said, it looks like the federal government is getting serious about this. and even though there's not a lot of federal money for education, most of this money comes from the states themselves or from local property taxes, the schools, of course, want that federal money.

13:56Peter Gray:So that's the carrot that the federal government waves to get schools to comply. So states got together to develop a common core system for meeting the federal requirement. What they did is they developed a set of objectives, learning objectives for students that would be the same objectives for all students at any given grade level, and that would be tested by standardized tests. And the standardized tests, improvement in scores on standardized tests would be the evidence to the federal government that the school was working, that it was improving, that children were learning at this school. The most significant part of it, in my opinion, was that the Common Core agreement was that teachers, principals, and whole schools would now be evaluated based upon student test scores.

15:08Peter Gray:So what did this do? This changed the way teaching occurs. You know, if you're a teacher and suddenly you are now going to be evaluated on the basis of those test scores, you're going to start teaching to the test, right? You're going to also be quite anxious about this, about your students performing well. And the result of that, it was a big change in what's happening in schools. Yeah. And as you know, there's a very popular competing theory out there by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who presented his theory in The Anxious Generation. And I've read both of your books, and I know you kind of both use the same graph that shows suicide rates kind of rising after 2010 for in adolescence.

16:02And you both also talk about the importance of free play and co-founded the organization Let Grow. But in your book, obviously, you both diverge after 2010. And his theory is that it's really social media and smartphones that have led to this increase in suicide rates in teens after 2010. Well, you're saying in that period it's really the rise of Common Core and, you know, this kind of stricter mentality around school that was leading to that result. So can you describe why you reject his theory? I know that you write in the book that you think the concern around social media is a moral panic, and you've even described the Anxious Generation as unethical.

16:55So can you describe why you feel that way?

16:58Peter Gray:So I should probably be careful about the word unethical. I maybe have to use that. But I think it's a huge, at minimum, it's a huge mistake. And I think that there was a real problem in how the book was done. So first of all, let me say I'm not the only person who rejects the social media smartphone theory. Essentially, everybody who actually does research in this area, the researchers who have, among them, done literally hundreds of studies testing the theory that social media and smartphones cause increased anxiety in young people, have almost routinely rejected that book. the theory that smartphones and social media are bad for kids was already pretty prevalent in the culture even before Jonathan Haidt's book so the population was ready for that book this appealed to their prejudice to begin with and so the book sold very well because people love to have their prejudice confirmed So that, but let me tell you, let me explain the evidence again.

18:17Peter Gray:First of all, there are actually in that book, if you actually look at, there are a lot of references in the book, but if you actually look, what are the references that actually have to do with research studies that are serious tests of the hypothesis being presented there? there are very few, very few out of hundreds of studies that were done. And what is completely ignored in that book is the dozens of meta-analyses and review articles that research has written about those studies. And what those show is that there's no overall, there's no meaningful correlation, let alone evidence for cause-effect relation, not even a meaningful correlation between the amount of time kids are on social media or on smartphones and their mental health.

19:16Peter Gray:You can find individual small studies that show a positive correlation between this use of digital technology and mental health, and you can find little studies that show a negative correlation. Most of the well-done larger studies show no meaningful correlation. If there's a correlation at all, it's so small as to be clinically meaningless. The meta-analyses show that overall, the pluses and minuses just wash out and there's no meaningful effect. There's no meaningful correlation. So the first problem with the book is it ignored the great bulk of the studies. It ignored the analyses that have been done.

20:02Peter Gray:So that's one argument. The second is that this was largely an American phenomenon. So this increase in suicide, anxiety, depression, beginning in 2010, it's very dramatic in the United States. It occurred in a couple of other countries, and I haven't looked at every single country, but I've looked at, for example, the entire European Union. If you take the European Union as a whole, in the European Union, kids were not deprived of social media. And so they were glomming on to it just like our kids were. They were on the same platforms and so on and so forth. If you look at the suicide rate for teenagers in the European Union, it was actually going down a little bit at the same time that it was spiking up in this country.

21:00Peter Gray:So this is something that happened in the United States that did not happen in the European Union. And that can't be smartphones and social media. The kids in the European Union, this was, you know, there are researchers who've looked worldwide and they've found no relationship at all over nations between the rollout of smartphones and social media and how much kids are on it on the one hand and indices of mental health on the other. There's just no relationship, no relationship overall. So why would this occur in the United States and not elsewhere? That's the first problem. So that leads, so those are the, There's other arguments I present in the book against it.

21:47There is, for even those cases where you do find, those studies where you do find a correlation and it's a small correlation, when you look longitudinally, it looks like where there is a correlation, it's not that being

22:03Peter Gray:on smartphones and social media is causing mental problems. It's the other way around. if you are anxious or depressed, you're a little more likely to go to be using social media, apparently, as a way of dealing with the anxiety and depression. I mean, you can well imagine how that could happen. You're anxious, depressed, and you're kind of inhibited about going out and meeting people in person, so you compensate by going online more. And maybe you're even looking for help with your problems by going online more. There's actually some research showing that the use of social media and smartphones has actually helped some kids who have psychological problems help them find support, help them find routes to overcoming the problem.

22:55Peter Gray:So that's the argument against that theory. Something I was wondering when I read Anxious Generation that I also wondered a bit reading restoring childhood was just whether it's really possible to pin something as large as the youth mental health crisis on one thing, whether that one thing is social media or Common Core. So I guess, can you explain, you know, why you're so convinced that we can point to this one big explanation for this problem? So let me be clear. It would be a real mistake to pin all of anxiety, any depression, suicide on one thing. That would be crazy. But what we're talking about is what changed that caused this sudden increase?

23:46Peter Gray:That could be one thing. All right, that doesn't mean that most suicides, most depression, most anxiety are caused by Common Core. All I'm saying is that increase in the rates of it that occurred at that time could be caused by Common Core. It's possible that a number of things changed at that time, right? But I haven't been able to find something else that changed that could account for a significant amount of it. Maybe there were some other changes that contributed to it, but I haven't seen the evidence for it. I see strong evidence that this change in schooling created a big increase over the whole population of young people in anxiety and depression.

24:39Peter Gray:First of all, school has always been the primary source of anxiety and depression among school-age kids overall. That doesn't mean it's the primary source for everybody. But when you're looking at the population at large, every single study that I've been able to find where kids are asked, what's the primary source of your anxiety or your stress or your depression? In every single one of them, school pressure comes out on top. Nothing else comes close. All the other things that we think about, sure, they're awful for some people, bad family dynamics, being abused in one way or another, being bullied.

25:25Peter Gray:These are things that affect some people, and they're terrible things that can happen to kids. But when you're looking at the whole population at large, the thing that's affecting everybody, essentially everybody, is school. Another bit of evidence showing that school has always been a leading source of stress, is that even before Common Core, the rates of anxiety, depression, mental health admissions for school-age kids, and suicides plummet every summer when school closes and increase again when school opens. This was true even before Common Core. It appears to be even more true after Common Core.

26:10Peter Gray:So school is without question a major source of anxiety and depression. That was true even before Common Core. So what happened with Common Core is school now became even more stressful than it was before. That's the basic argument, and sufficiently such that it resulted in that spike in anxiety, depression, suicide between 2010 and 2018. Interestingly, we reached a peak in 2018. It's gone down a little bit since then, which is a good thing. I think it's because Common Core, I think there could be possible various reasons, but I think it's primarily because Common Core has kind of burned itself out.

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