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Smartphones are bad for some teens, not all

Young people who are already struggling offline might experience greater negative effects of life online, writes Candice Odgers.
  1. Candice Odgers

    1. Candice Odgers is a professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California, Irvine; a research professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA; and a Fellow of the Jacobs Foundation and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

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Last year, I received a phone call from an angry father. He had just read in the newspaper about my research suggesting that some adolescents might benefit from time spent online. Once, he raged, his children had been fully engaged with family and church and had talked non-stop at meal times. Now, as adolescents who were constantly connected to their phones, they had disappeared into their online lives.

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Nature 554, 432-434 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02109-8

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 23 March 2018: An earlier version of this Comment misrepresented the starting year of the study on depressive episodes and the increases between 2005 and 2014.

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