Discovery Institute’s podcasting director and Mind Matters contributor Andrew McDiarmid recently appeared on the Michael Medved Show, a podcast on “pop culture and politics.” Medved and McDiarmid discussed the mental health crisis among teens and adolescents due in large part, per the research, to the explosion of social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. McDiarmid has written on this issue before at length, and strongly believes that if we care about the next generation, we would do well to heed what’s going on with the youths and their smartphones and do something about it.

“It all started around 2010,” McDiarmid told Medved, going on to say:

Facebook was kicking things into high gear, Twitter was on the scene and kids started to wrestle with how to use this, to cope with this. And that’s really where we see the disruption of in-person social interactions amongst kids, the interference with sleep time and the quality of sleep, the cyber bullying really kicking into high gear, the toxic online environments. And as we can talk about later, kids are uniquely vulnerable to these behaviors coming into play. And again, as we’ll talk about, the technology companies, they’ve known what they’re doing and they’re producing this addictive content with addictive technologies. And we have to stand up and we have to stop it.

–Discovery Institute on Teens and Smartphones – The Michael Medved Show

McDiarmid’s observations are in line with the data. Noted social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that the mental health epidemic among teenagers, particular teen girls, really began around 2012 or so. While more people are raising the alarm, there is still a lot of work to be done and awareness that needs to be raised. McDiarmid went on to comment on how young people in particular are more vulnerable both to addictive behaviors and peer pressure. These sorts of issues spike in a child’s early teen years and have long-lasting consequences. McDiarmid said,

We have age restriction laws governing all kinds of things, driving, voting, getting into the military, smoking. Why would we treat social media any differently? And in fact, the inventor of the endless scroll feature that we all seem to see in these platforms these days has likened it to behavioral cocaine.

He went on to champion an upcoming piece of legislation in Utah that requires parental consent for children aged 13-17 to get a social media account. More practically, McDiarmid urged parents to simply not give their kids smartphones.

Be sure to listen to the whole conversation here.