Candice Odgers

And the action among kids is really in these side group chats or discord.

And that's where all the interaction happens, right?

On these platforms where they have these smaller groups, usually people that they know offline, and they're pulling in content from online or social media and from youth culture and sharing it there.

But they're not out there creating a ton of the content that's online.

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.