All the Sad Young Things

Maybe the problem for teens isn’t screens, but what they are replacing.

- By Laura Vanderkam

MALI WARD'S PARENTS weren't thrilled at the thought of their eldest daughter venturing into social media. Now 17, Ward had to lobby for access to Snapchat during her freshman year of high school. "I had to convince my parents about that, with a whole slideshow and everything," she recalls.

After she made the case that she should be able to use the app to share silly pictures with her friends, her parents relented. Snapchat turned out to be a blessing. This was fall 2020. Ward had just started making friends at her new school in Brookfield, Wisconsin, when her family members-including five siblings-got COVID-19, one by one. The entire household was quarantined for weeks.

"I couldn't see anyone," she says. "It was scary, especially since I'd only been in school for a month." But "Snapchat made it a lot easier to talk to people, including people I had just met.

Without that, I wouldn't have been able to talk to them at all." Snapchat is seldom the hero in stories about teens and emotions, but I keep thinking of Ward's experience as I read headlines about social media and what people have been calling the teen mental health crisis. Rates of anxiety and depression have seemingly risen for adolescents since 2009. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, rates of adolescent depression have risen from 8.1 percent in 2009 to 15.8 percent in 2019; there is some evidence of a further rise during the pandemic. The suicide rate among Americans aged 10-24 increased from 6.8 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.7 in 2018.