Candice Odgers

They are creating some.

So they're going there to like find out information, connect with friends, reduce boredom, sometimes to find help for mental health problems, seek support.

We're seeing a lot of support seeking now, especially with conversational agents.

And so many of the reasons they go online are the reasons that they connect with people in the offline world too.

So that's a great question.

It's going to be an it's complicated answer.

I know that's what academics always give.

But the good news is that the things I started my career really focused on, things like substance use, so alcohol use, violence, educational dropout, those things have plummeted.

Right.

And so we have and this has been going on for about 20 years, the lowest rates of alcohol use of teen pregnancy.

We have the most educated generation in terms of high school graduation.

And it's interesting on almost every metric that you can measure.

So if you think about intelligence or empathy, other types of characteristics.

Kids today actually look pretty good and they look better than we did.

And so there's a lot of shaming of young people, both about their mental health and about things like intelligence or narcissism or empathy.

And it's just simply not the case that they're worse than us.

And it's simply not the case that we're in a crisis.

Now I'm going to get to the part where I am concerned.

While we've seen these improvements in externalizing behaviors, we've seen young people reporting that they're more anxious about the world that they live in, that they're sadder than they have been previously.

They report all kinds of concerns in those spaces.