Candice Odgers

We've seen a change in the demographics of U.S.

adolescents.

So now in California and Texas, for example, 70 percent of students in high school actually identify with a group that has been traditionally minoritized or discriminated against.

And we know that that matters for daily health.

And so there's there's a lot of factors and saying it's a lot of factors doesn't.

to sell a story easily, right?

It's easier to say it's social media and it's smartphones and to shut that off.

But when you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list.

Yeah, I think it is simple to scare people with statistics.

And, you know, I'm a quantitative psychologist as well.

And I teach graduate statistics and we can draw a lot of scary, scary graphs.

And that happens.

Unfortunately, that happens in the media every day.

And whenever I see one of these graphs, what I do is I do the thing where I expand the axes and say, what's really happening?

And then I go back to the original source.

And it is stunning how many times these lines are cherry picked or manipulated.

We saw it actually this week in the Financial Times.

There was a big graph and they said since the inception of the smartphone, birth rates have declined around the world.

And so it was also birth rates did decline after the Great Recession because...

You wouldn't have any money.