Candice Odgers

Both things can be true.

We need to clean up the online world for everyone, and especially our children, and social media is not the major driver of teen mental health problems for most adolescents today.

But instead of cleaning up the online world and prosecuting perpetrators of online harm, regardless of the office or the position in society that they hold, we are punishing victims.

We're kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming them offline.

We've already kicked teenagers out of public spaces.

In the US, we've created a society where firearms are the number one killer of our children.

And now we're telling our kids that we're going to take away the spaces that they're going to virtually gather and create community because adults broke that, too.

Yeah, I'm saying adults broke the internet, and they're trying to fix it by kicking kids off.

So a social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe them, it's not going to work.

It'll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces, and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them to be well.

So if a social media ban might make things worse, what would make things better?

So first, we need to invest in the adults around children.

Did you know that the ratio of counselors to students in U.S.

middle schools is 1 to 500?

Spending millions of dollars on yonder pouches to lock up kids' phones is not going to solve that.

We need to take that money, we need to hire teachers, we need to hire counselors, and we need to pay them well.

Building a healthy human requires investment in children and the adults around them, full stop.

Second, we need to build spaces that are welcoming and safe for all teens to build the skills they need for the future.

So my colleague Steven Schuller spends his days designing digital mental health services for rural communities and opening up youth drop-in centers across the state of California for young people who need it.

We know young people are more likely to go online when they're anxious and depressed.