The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.
Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and bestselling author of The Anxious Generation, last week said he had done “an amazing job” at keeping his children away from social media, telling BBC Radio 4 that his 16-year-old daughter has yet to sign up: “She doesn’t want it. She sees what it did to the other girls.”
By contrast, Odgers, a professor of developmental psychology who has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years, takes a different approach. She gave both her children smartphones when they turned 11 and let her daughter start using Snapchat at the same age.
She thinks politicians and parents are worrying about the wrong things when they point to social media as the primary explanation for a growing mental health crisis among young people. She is frustrated by the global race to remove phones from schools and to ban social media for under-16s. She was “disappointed” when the UK announced it would follow Australia in implementing a ban.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that bans are likely to make things worse, not better,” Odgers says via a video call from her home in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Odgers’ analysis of the evidence makes her doubtful whether children’s brains have been rewired by mobile phones and certain that there is limited data to support the idea that social media is driving a dip in adolescent mental health.
Odgers and Haidt are scientists who have spent years reading the same studies, yet come to starkly different conclusions. Is it a bit mean of them to haul their teenage children into the spotlight to illustrate their contrasting perspectives on a raging debate on the dangers of digital childhood? Perhaps. But explaining how they incorporate research into their family lives is a convenient shorthand that takes us to the heart of a complex issue.
Haidt’s book has sold more than 2m copies in 44 languages since it was published two years ago. His theory of the “great rewiring of childhood”, the book’s subtitle, has inspired parents to campaign for smartphone bans at schools and helped drive the political debate over age restrictions on social media use.
Despite her impressive academic qualifications, Odgers does not yet have Haidt’s international reach. Her recently released Ted Talk, “What we’re…
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