Candice Odgers

speaker

328 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Candice Odgers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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How to Be a Better Human · What the data shows about youth mental health (w/ Candice Odgers) · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Hi, I'm Candice Odgers.

I'm a developmental psychologist.

I've been working with teens for the past 25 years to help understand their lives online and off.

So I think what we're getting wrong is the first thing and often the only thing we're talking about these days is their phones.

And to me, you know, working with young people, being a parent of teenagers, coaching young people, that's the last thing I see.

That's the least interesting thing that I see about them.

how they use their phone or why they're going to their phone, that starts to get my interest.

But just what do phones do to kids?

That's not an interesting question to me or as interesting as the young people themselves.

Yeah, so this is a thing we constantly hear and it's a really scary thing.

So as a parent of teenagers, I constantly have to check my assumptions against data because we hear it so often and we hear it so often that we believe that it's true.

And the most interesting thing for me in this time of working with young people and being on their phones and trying to understand what factors influence their mental health

One of the most interesting things has been this distance between what research is generating day in and day out and then the stories that we're being told about how this is a dramatic predictor of teen mental health, that it's driving the youth mental health crisis, that there's these big effects that we see and that there'll be massive effects if we turn it off.

And I'm not saying that the book is closed and we know all the things.

We certainly don't.

But it's certainly not the case that the science that's being produced right now supports these massive policy actions and these beliefs that so many people hold today.

Yeah, so we've known for a long time from all kinds of fields, from like psychiatric epidemiology, from sociology, from psychology, from education, that the health and the behavior of adults around young people is one of the most important things that shapes their behavior.

And this is true even in the perinatal stage of maternal depression and then after births in young toddler years to childhood and adolescence.

So parental mental health is super important and very predictive.

of how young people are going to do in the world.

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