Candice Odgers

But if you're doing this from a position of fear and you're being told that you should do this because social media causes all of these things, for example, you know, that's a that's a message that's not supported by the science.

I wouldn't make them from a place of fear where your child is going to fall into that.

Yes.

So the addiction frame is kind of a whole other really big problem right now in terms of how we're thinking about this.

To describe behavior that's very normative.

Right.

And to tell young people that they're addicted to this and to frame it in that way when it's clearly not in the clinical sense that we would use it.

But I think you're right.

It's a tough, tough spot for parents to be in who want something different and don't know how to get there.

But I do think that putting all of our hopes and prayers in banning is going to backfire, right?

And it can actually make things worse.

So it can push young people into less safe and less regulated spaces.

It can take pressure off companies to make the online world better for everyone.

And we just know, I mean, if we step back and think about this at all,

We know that banning use from online spaces is not going to work, and we're seeing that play out in Australia right now, right?

So what has happened there?

Yeah, so Australia was the first country in the world to ban social media for under-16s.

They rushed it through after a year, actually, after one of the wives of a politician read The Anxious Generation, and this all went through very quickly.

And then in December 2025, when platforms kicked kids off, what happened is that all the under-16s still had access to YouTube, for example, and it's the number one platform that the children and youth are on.

But what they had lost were their accounts, which had...