A New Yorker essay revisits the debate over teens, phones, mental health, and why parents should be careful with simple explanations.
For about a decade, a single explanation for teenage unhappiness has taken on the force of common sense: it is the phones. The story is easy to believe and easy to act on. A recent essay in The New Yorker asks parents to slow down and look harder at what the evidence actually shows.
In “Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?” (The New Yorker, June 30, 2025), staff writer Molly Fischer reviews a shelf of recent books about adolescence and technology. Her conclusion is not that phones are harmless. It is that the honest answer to the question in her title is far less settled than the headlines, the new state laws, and the bestseller lists suggest.
Why the phone theory is so persuasive
Part of the appeal, Fischer notes, is that a smartphone gathers so many possible harms into one device: social comparison, lost sleep, body-image pressure, and a constant pull on attention. The explanation is also bipartisan, drawing on worry about corporate power and on worry about a coddled generation at the same time. And it matches what many teachers and parents feel they see every day. Lawmakers have responded. Several states, including Florida, Utah, California, and New York, have moved to limit minors’ access to social media, and Texas recently came close to banning it for minors outright.
The contemporary version of this argument took shape with the psychologist Jean Twenge, whose 2017 book “iGen” tied a decline in teen well-being to the spread of the smartphone. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sharpened it in “The Anxious Generation,” a 2024 bestseller that describes a generational rewiring between 2010 and 2015, driven by too much protection in the real world and too little in the virtual one. Haidt’s prescriptions are unusually specific: no smartphones before high school, no social-media accounts until sixteen, phone-free schools, and far more unsupervised play.
Where the evidence gets murky
Fischer’s most useful service to parents is to show how much of this rests on contested data. Much of the early evidence was correlational, and critics have questioned whether the international picture is as uniform as Haidt suggests. Some figures point the other way. As the essay notes, teen depression in South Korea fell over roughly the same years, and in the United States, suicide rates have risen across most age groups, not only among teenagers. Even the closely watched rise in depression among American teenage girls is harder to read than it appears. The science journalist David Wallace-Wells has pointed out that the increase lined up with a change in medical guidelines that led far more doctors to screen teenage girls for depression in the first place. Part of the rise, in other words, may reflect more asking rather than only more suffering.
The numbers that travel furthest deserve the same scrutiny. A widely cited figure from a 2022 Pew Research Center report found that 46 percent of teens say they are online “almost constantly,” a statistic that, as Fischer observes, sounds both true and slightly unknowable. A Surgeon General advisory likewise reported that nearly 70 percent of parents find parenting harder than it was twenty years ago, with technology and social media the top reasons given, though that figure rests on parents comparing today against a past most of them never lived as parents.
Into this debate steps the journalist Matt Richtel, whose new book “How We Grow Up” stakes out a deliberately middle position. Richtel treats phones as a genuine concern but not a single cause, and he resists tidy claims about what makes teenagers suffer. “The only thing worse than no answer is a false one,” he writes. He also points to changes in adolescence itself, including earlier puberty, and argues that today’s teenagers are not passive victims of their devices but active participants in a culture they are helping to shape.
For families, the takeaway is steadying rather than frightening. The strongest honest answer right now is that no one fully knows how much phones are to blame, and that uncertainty is worth holding onto. It argues for paying attention to the things that are well understood, such as sleep, real-world independence, and connection at home, and for resisting the false comfort of a single villain. Fischer’s full essay is sharper and more skeptical than any summary can capture, and it is worth reading in The New Yorker.
