The Vergecast - Is social media driving teen mental health issues?

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his book, The Anxious Generation. In it, he argued that the rise of social media and smartphone use is to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. This month, psychology researcher Peter Gray takes on that narrative with his book, Restoring Childhood. In a conversation with senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, Gray argues that school — not social media — is the real culprit. Further reading: The premium AirPods 5 are the best open-ear earbuds Apple has made All dressed up with hardware to go. A street photographer tested Dyson’s new CameraJet toothbrush. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of asking what's up with kids these days. I'm Lauren Feiner, the Virges 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. It 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 he's 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. John 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 Widows Bay swept in its categories.

It won Best Comedy and broke the record for most Emmys won by a comedy in one year. In all, Apple TV won 28 Emmys this year, more than any other outlet. new CEO John Turnus 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 15.

2026. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG private wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams.

Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Peter Gray, welcome to The Vergecast. 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 exactly.

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 were, they increased steadily between 1950 and 1990. 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 between five and tenfold increases over that time. So 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, got better for a while. Between 1990 and about 2012 or so, rates of anxiety, depression, suicide

decline. 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. 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. 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, they're not learning. this, 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. 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, And 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. 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. It also gave especially teenagers a new status

because in so many households, the teenager was the computer guru. They were the ones who figured it out and kind of taught their parents how to use it. So my first. 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? 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. 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's 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. Yeah, 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? 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 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. So that's the carrot that the federal government waives 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. It 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. 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. 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. And you both also talk about the importance of free play and co-founded the organization and 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.

While 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. So can you describe why you feel that way? 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 the, 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 Heights 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 it. love to have their prejudice confirmed.

So the, so that, but, but, but let me tell you, let me, let me, let me explain the evidence again. 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 so, and what is completely ignored in that book is the dozens of analysis, meta-analyses

and review articles that research have 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. 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 correlations. 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. So that's one, 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, 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 on. 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. 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.

There are researchers who have 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, you know, there's other arguments I present in the book against it. There 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 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 depression. I mean, you can well imagine how that could happen. You're anxious, depressed.

that 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 roots to overcoming the problem. 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, depression, suicide on one thing. That would be crazy. So, you know, but what we're talking about is what changed that caused this sudden increase? That could be one thing. All right. That doesn't mean that most suicides, most depression, most anxiety are quite. 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. 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? And 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. 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 the 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. 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 so 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, I think it's primarily because Common Core has kind of burned itself out. Support for the show comes from Framer. When you're trying to build trust and credibility as a business or creator,

having a beautiful and functional website is essential. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. It's an enterprise-level solution powered by agents that provides premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime. With Framer, agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale.

People bring taste, judgment, and control. Framers' agents solve the gap between AI-generated ideas and production-ready website work. That's why leading brands like perplexity and media. Miro, build their websites and Framer. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash Verge for 30% off our Framer pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Superhuman. Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You have a project you need help with, so you go to an AI platform, open a new tab, start from scratch and re-explained context every single time. Superhuman Go wants to save you from the TDM. Superhuman Go comes from the makers of Grammarly. It can embed in the tools you and your team already use, always ready to help without having you switch apps or break your flow. It can help you make sense of a dense message shred, help you get ready for a meeting, or catch a typo before you hit send. And when you get stuck, Go can help you brainstorm, outline, or review relevant context so you don't lose your place. It's basically an AI assistant that's always on, always ready to help.

The bottom line, Superhuman is built for people who take their work seriously and expect their tools to do the same. You can try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. You gotta try breakfast. And what better way than with a delicious pre-organic coffee? Starting with just $1 all day, every day, now until December 31st. You gotta try breakfast.

I'm participating A&W locations in Ontario. What's up everybody? It's Cam Hayward, Steelers captain, and host of Not Just Football. We just sat down with Aaron Rogers, four-time MVP, Super Bowl champion, future Hall of Famer for one of the most open and honest

conversations we've ever had on the show. There was so much to get into, we had to split in the two parts. Part one is out right now, and trust me, you don't want to miss it. Aaron gives us his real story behind coming back for one final season. We also talk about how he was ready to retire once Mike T stepped down and how reuniting with McCarthy changed everything. We get into playing with Mike T for one more year. This year's squad, the old team narrative, who stood out this summer and what it's like

to be in the quarterback. Aaron also opens up about what he still has left to accomplish this season and what it looks like when he hangs it up with it. And that's only part one. Part two drops this Thursday. That's when we go beyond football. the conspiracy theories. What people still get wrong about Aaron Rodger. His legacy, Super Bowl ring, the goat, the bait, and the overrated and underrated where things really get off limits. Part one is out right now.

Part two drops this Thursday, September 10th. Watch Notches Football with Cam Hayward on YouTube, or listen to Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Just going back to why you reject the social media theory, you cite this large academic record, finding minimal or mixed effects of social media on teens' mental health. But even despite that, you know, we see this idea has really taken hold. And I think a lot of people have kind of individual experiences that they feel like backs up that theory,

where they feel like they see their kids really struggling with their smartphone use, social media use, social comparison based on their social media usage. So I guess when you talk to people about their experiences with social media and smartphones and kids, and they have these kind of lived experiences, how do you try to convince them that this issue might be more complicated than what they think? I have a lot of sympathy for individual parents who say, look, my kid, I believe. my kid is suffering because they are, whatever it is, addicted to social media. It's very hard for me to know because I don't know the kids. I don't know the parents. I believe there are some kids who are having problems. I believe there are some kids who are greatly benefiting from it. In the statistical data, this all washes out. They balances out.

Some kids are doing better. Some kids are doing worse because they're on social media. What I look at are the studies, are the, are the, are the systematic studies. It's very hard. You can, you can, if you take, if you just take case reports, case examples, you can prove any theory you want if you think that the case example is enough. I mean, there are millions of kids out there, right? And so there's always going to be somebody and a significant number of people that you could point to and you say, this is having a terrible effect on them, at least as far as we can tell us having a terrible fact. That's why, you know, when we have these various moral panics,

and in my book I describe moral panics related to media, but, you know, back in the early 1980s, we had a moral panic about kids going outdoors without parental accompaniment. There were a couple of cases of young children who were snatched off the street and murdered, right? and this made big news. And so everybody began to believe there are strangers out there around every corner ready to snatch your child away.

And there was a real panic about it. And that panic even today is preventing people from allowing their children to go outdoors and play without an adultic company. Even though this is extraordinarily rare, it gets into the popular mind. And then when people see something that looks like it, might be that they interpret it as that. So your expectations in some sense affect what you see. So let's say, you know, again, I really want to be careful not to blame parents. I think parents are as much victims of this social worry as anybody else is. But imagine that you are a parent and you've got a kid who's spending a heck of a lot of time on social media, right?

And you're also hearing from Jonathan Haidt that this is bad and hearing from your neighbors that this is bad. So now you look at it and you look for every possible reason why this might be harming your child. Maybe it's not actually harming your child, but you perceive it as harming your child. I can't say that to any individual parent with confidence, but I'm sure it is happening to some degree.

This happens all the time. We perceive, you know, we see things. We see children looking at their smartphone. We don't know exactly what they're doing on their smartphone. We see them on social media. We see them playing video games. We are as adults kind of in mystery about what they're actually doing. And so we imagine the worst.

And then when a book like Jonathan Heights comes out that tells us the worst, right? then we imagine it even more. That's how moral panics develop. And so I don't want to say that there are no problems. There's pornography. It would be great if we could have some system that would prevent at least young kids from getting to pornography.

There are algorithms that are affecting kids and leading them to be scrolling on stuff and wasting more time than they want. But there's ways that we could teach children and help children learn how to use all this safely, how to manage their time more carefully on it. The studies that I look at are really the studies that are systematic studies that ask the question, overall, are these things having a harmful effect or a beneficial effect? there's more studies. Most studies show no particular effect overall one way or the other.

There are some studies that show definitely a beneficial effect. Jonathan Haidt praises kids going outdoors and is against their being online. What he's missing is that increasingly in this digital world, there's not a separation between going outdoors and being online. you and I probably carry this thing with us every time we go outdoors because it helps us navigate. It helps us if we get lost, it helps us find our way home. It helps us connect with the people we want to meet. If we're meeting up with somebody outdoors, we can keep in touch with them. Okay, I'm here at the corner. When are you going to get here and so on and so forth? If we're interested in nature, we can use our smartphone to our little,

plant identification app to see what we're looking at. If we happen to be out after dark, we've got a flashlight. This is, among other, it's a safety device. If we get hurt, we can call 911. Why would we want to take that away from our kids? Yeah. So, you know, it sounds like there are certain elements of this technology you feel like shouldn't be restricted from even kids or teens. But are there certain guardrails that can be placed on social media that would not necessarily impede kids' ability to play online in this way? And also, I'm not sure how much you've gotten to read about it yet, but we are recording on the day that META settled a major case over kids' online safety with the group of state AGs and included things like age verification,

and limiting push notifications during school and nighttime hours. So I'm curious if those are the sorts of things you think are impeding play or kind of access to the space that kids can learn to navigate on their own or if those are reasonable limitations on the technology. I mean, I do think there are some reasonable limitations. I'm not sure how effective the imitations will be. Kids are amazingly adapted at getting around. limitations, right? So, you know, there's evidence. So, for example, in Australia, which is banned

social media, that kids are on social media just as much as they were before the ban. So it's a little hard to know how effective it is. We know, for example, that, you know, we don't allow kids to drink alcohol in this country before a certain age. There's a lot of drinking of alcohol before that age. So how much bans help, how much restrictions help, how much AIDS restrictions are going to be effective. I'm not too confident. What I think we really, you know, but I'm not necessarily against these things, as long as you're not taking the tool away from kids, as long as you're not depriving them of the free speech opportunities that these provide, the opportunities to communicate with one another, the opportunities to go online, the opportunities to make use of social media,

which is extraordinarily valuable for a lot of kids, that has served a lot of great functions over time, some of which I talk about in the book. So you take these things away and you are really depriving them of a major tool of expression, a major tool of communication, a major tool of education, to be honest, when you take this away. So making certain restrictions like, you know, not having it at school, you know, that's kind of an odd thing that in this day and age of the computer age, you would think and I'll be all about computers, you know, at school. That's the most powerful educational tool we have, and yet here we are.

We want to ban it at school. Yeah. And I guess just do you think things like age verification to give, you know, younger users a more guardrailed experience are things that are too restrictive? And are there certain offline, certain online harms that might be, need more attention and protection than offline? I think that there are some nations, as I understand, that have very good, that seemingly workable age restriction verifications for pornography.

And, you know, I don't have a strong opinion about it, but I think that if you can create an effective age verification system for pornography, that might be a good thing. Yeah, in the social media context, I think you told the Atlantic that you think age minimums to access social media would be a violation of human rights. So do you think differently about age verification for social media or is it okay as long as there's some level of access for kids to social media? Well, again, it was hard to know where do you draw the line and how do you draw the line without creating harm? I think what we need to do is one of the things that has run through my research all along in my previous book, Free to Learn,

is we need to begin trusting kids more than we do. We need to stop treating kids as if they're idiots. We need to start understanding that kids are pretty good at knowing. what's good for them and not good for them, and they can benefit from our help in learning how to do these things. So I am all for empowering children in every way that we can, and part of empowering them is providing them with the knowledge that they might need in order to be safe as they explore, whether they're exploring offline or online. When I was a kid, kid in the 1950s where five-year-olds walked to school by themselves and did errands,

quit shopping for their parents, sometimes picked up things. And so on as I did when I was five years old, you would never even then send a kid out to do that without preparing them. You would teach them how to cross the street. You would teach them to, if you're playing ball, don't chase the ball out into the street. You would teach them if somebody stops in a car and they offer you candy to get in the car you don't know who it is, don't do it. You give them safety instructions,

and kids are capable of understanding safety instructions and following them. Similarly with online. So kids are, first of all, what the studies show is kids are a lot more sophisticated about the online dangers than most adults understand they are. They're oftentimes more sophisticated than their parents are about it.

But not all kids are, and especially young kids are not. I think we adults have a responsibility to understand what the dangers are. If we think there are dangers, what are those dangers? And helping our kids understand what they are and helping them know how to deal with those dangers.

So I think that is far more, a far more effective approach in the long run than trying to simply ban them from having it, in which case they're never learning how to use it. At some point, they're going to use it, right? At some point, we can't stop them from using it anymore, and it would be very harmful to their development if we stop them from using it.

Yeah, and I think your book presents this really interesting theory, but you're releasing it into this world where the anxious generation has already had this really huge influence on policy and how parents around the country and around the world think about teen mental health, And I personally hear Jonathan Heights name come up in conversation with people in positions of power are completely unprompted talking about regulating social media and technology. So, you know, given that that's kind of where this book is going to be entering,

how do you anticipate your theory is going to be received? And do you worry that it's almost too late to break through? I certainly hope it's not too late. We've been through this, as I described in one of my chapters in the book on moral panics, we've been through this kind of thing before. So, for example, the most recent moral panic had to do with video games in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a real panic about it. People believed that video games were causing violent behavior.

There were these anecdotal reports. Every time there was a school shooting, you know, there would be a news article. saying that while the school shooter had been playing violent video games, so that obviously explains why the school shooter was shooting. What the articles didn't point out is that basically all males of school shooter age were playing violent video games. So, in fact, somebody finally did a study showing that school shooters were actually less likely than non-school shooters of the same sex and age category to be playing violent

video games. So the idea of, so we've been through this before. There were parents who wouldn't allow their kids to play video games because they believed they were all violent, they were all harmful. Gradually, we got over it. We got over it, especially when the kids who were playing violent video games and other video games, when they were kids, grew up and had kids themselves. And we're still playing those games.

and now there's much less of a negative feeling about playing the games. This is understood. This is play. It's real play. It's healthy. It's not harmful. There are still some people who demonize those, but most people don't. We went through a similar thing in previous.

There was a period of time after World War II when horror comic books were, kids were glomming on to horror comic books. They were having supposedly, they were, you know, The worry was they were having nightmares. This was increasing anxiety. It was increasing crime because there were crime related to these comics. There were attempts to ban the comics. There were politicians getting behind this and so on and so forth.

And there was never good scientific evidence. This was having these problems. But we went through that moral panic when we passed out of it. Eventually, in some sense, the science went out. eventually. So it's not me that's going to win out. It's the science that's going to win out. And I'm trying to represent the science in this book. And I'm not the only one doing so. Peter, it was great to have you and get to talk through your new book and this really interesting theory. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

That's it for the Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866. verge 1-1 or email Vergecast at theverge.com. And to support everything we do here and get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larcuk. See you next time.