A bestseller blamed phones for teen distress; a review disagreed

The short answer

In 2024, psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, arguing that smartphones and social media, combined with less independent play, rewired childhood and drove a surge in teen anxiety and depression from the early 2010s. Days later, a review in Nature by psychologist Candice Odgers argued that the studies Haidt draws on mostly show an association between screens and distress, not proof that screens caused it. Both agree that something changed for many adolescents; they disagree about how confident anyone can be about why.

What the evidence says

The book's own evidence page assembles several strands: rising rates of major depressive episodes among US teenagers, more emergency-department visits and hospitalisations for self-harm, higher suicide rates among adolescent girls, and similar upward trends in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It also cites a 37-country study of rising school loneliness. The page itself notes it is describing trends over time rather than making the full causal case, which it says appears elsewhere in the book.

The Nature review, published 29 March 2024, accepts that youth mental health worsened but disputes the mechanism. Odgers points to longitudinal research suggesting the more consistent pattern is that teenagers who already have mental-health problems tend to use social media more, rather than platform use predicting later depression. She names other candidates that rose over the same period, including child poverty, gun violence and the opioid crisis in parts of the United States.

For context

Neither document is a new original study; each is a synthesis built on other researchers' data, and reasonable experts read that same literature differently. A trend line that rises alongside smartphone adoption is consistent with phones as a cause, but it is equally consistent with several causes moving together, or with reverse pathways where distress changes behaviour rather than the other way round. The disagreement is less about whether teenagers are struggling and more about how much weight a correlational literature can bear.

A practical next step

Rather than treating either text as final, you could use the book's suggestions, such as later smartphones, delayed social media and more unsupervised time, as options to try and observe, tracking how your teenager describes their own sleep, mood and friendships rather than only counting screen minutes.

• What changed in my teenager's sleep, friendships or mood, and when did it change relative to any device or app they gained?
• Are we responding to a national trend line or to something specific we have noticed in our own household?
• If we adjust a rule about phones or apps, what would count as evidence that it helped?

The debate is likely to continue as more longitudinal data accumulate. Reading the two documents side by side is more useful than choosing a side: it separates what most researchers accept, that many measures of teen distress rose, from what remains contested, how much of that rise a single cause can explain.