Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| July 2026
Adulthood is deteriorating from tolerating to celebrating and rewarding violent, abusive grownups and officials who ignore real predators because they’d rather grandstand over social media.
Again, I suggest watching psychologist and social media scholar Candice Odgers’ TED talk and new interview by tech journalist Taylor Lorenz, the latest featuring a powerful scientific reality that “ban teens from social media” crusaders simply refuse to talk about.
Odgers’ and colleagues’ recent study of United Kingdom youth published in The Lancet found that “419 (20.3%) of 2,063 young people reported being moderately or severely cybervictimised between ages 12 years and 18 years.” Further, “cybervictimised adolescents were more likely to report generalised anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, self-harm or suicide attempt, post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder, and psychotic experiences compared with those not cybervictimised.”
Odgers et als’ study parallels United States Centers for Disease Control surveys showing around 16% of teens report being cyberbullied. Compared to non-cyberbullied teens, teens bullied online were 1.9 times more likely to report frequently poor mental health, 3.6 times more likely to report attempting suicide, and 5.5 times more likely to report self-harming.
So, online life is indeed dangerous to teens’ mental health, right? “Social media provides an endless way for other kids to be cruel,” declares psychologist Jean Twenge, who argues for banning teens from social media.
Just one complication, Odgers points out: “There’s this huge overlap.”
Just 2% of the 419 cyberbullied teens in her and colleagues’ UK study reported “online abuse without having experienced offline victimization” as well (emphasis mine). “Most of the overlap was in-the-home victimization,” and it was offline bullying by “people who knew them very well”, not cyberbullying, that “predicted mental health problems” among teens.
Likewise, U.S. statistics from CDC surveys show teens report violent abuses inflicted by parents and household grownups are twice as common, and emotional abuses by these adults are nearly 4 times more common, than being cyberbullied. Similar to the finding by Odgers et al’s UK study, 83% of U.S. teens who report cyberbullying ALSO report being violently and psychologically bullied at home by adults.
The crucial reality teenagers face that cyberbullying online nearly always accompanies violence and bullying by adults at home must be too rough for Twenge and other ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders to handle. The never mention it.
“The majority of young people who are harmed are harmed offline by people they know in places where they should be safe,” Odgers concludes. “Any place where adults are, there will be harm to children… churches, schools, homes; homes is the big one.”
However vital confronting home and grownup abuses are to good-faith efforts to prevent bullying and prioritize youths’ well-being – as opposed to authorities’ derelictions and prioritizing grownups feeling good about ourselves – the UK and U.S. political debates decree that mentioning domestic abuses victimizing teens is not permitted; only cyberbullying may be discussed.
This official dereliction endangers vastly more children and teens. To truly protect children, Odgers concludes, “we would invest in the resources to track online and offline predators. But that is not what we’re doing.”
We still care about child abuse… sort of
Underfunded, understaffed, unpublicized U.S. agencies still investigate abuse cases, substantiating some 65,000 violent, 40,000 sexual, 22,000 psychological, and 65,000 multiple maltreatments (including 1,800 murders) of children and teens by their parents and caretakers in 2024.
Similarly, UK government reports clearly show skyrocketing grownup drug abuse and soaring domestic violence victimizing children, including dozens of parent-inflicted murders of children. For murder victims under age 16, the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) reports, “the most common suspect, where recorded, was a parent or step-parent”. (Funny, the wildly acclaimed, incessantly cited Netflix hit series Adolescence gave exactly the opposite impression.)
As a former mandated child abuse reporter and member/president of a state Children’s Trust Fund board, I can affirm substantiated cases are just a tiny fraction of what actually occurs. True, a trailer-park stepdad who beats or rapes kids might still get investigated and punished, albeit haphazardly. And “third party” perpetrators (that is, non-family abusers like a coach, teacher, scoutmaster, online predator, etc.) against whom parents demand action, along with enemies of powerful political entities, may get caught, often after long delays.
But authorities acting merely to protect a child or teen without advancing some larger adult goal? These cases, sporadically investigated to begin with, are meeting a troubling new hostility that dismisses them as unimportant, unwanted challenges that threaten authorities’ crusade against teens using social media.
The silence, and worse
Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Twenge, whose books spanning over 1,000 pages deploring the “teenage mental health crisis” have popularized them as leading “experts,” incessantly interviewed and afforded august forums. They never mention the leading cause of that “crisis” by far, parental and household abuses and adversities.
In fact, Haidt, Twenge, colleague Zach Rausch, and other luminaries remain popular because they ignore disturbing CDC surveys and analyses showing widespread abuses at home devastate teens’ mental health far worse than the trivial-to-zero effects of social media Haidt et al obsess over.
In unanimous sycophancy, professionals, political leaders, and media reporters quail from raising unpleasant adult abuse issues while flattering themselves as heroes rescuing “children” from “addictive” social media.
In a particularly disgusting non-sequitur concerning last year’s Los Angeles’s social media “addiction” trial, psychologist David Stein dismissed as “unethical,” “cowardly,” and “disinformation” any mention of the plaintiff mother’s and now-absent father’s violent, relentlessly brutal abuses and abandonments that drove one of their teenage daughters to suicide and the other to lifelong mental distress (see below). The only issue Stein and other commentators cared about was social media.
Major interests don’t frame it that baldly, but they clearly agree. The results of social media “addiction” trials, disastrous for children and teens, delight culture-war escapists. They find it perfectly acceptable that a violently abusive parent and an attorney general who ignored real-life pedophiles menacing children were awarded millions of dollars and widespread acclamation for grandstanding against teens going online.
The details reveal today’s youth-hating
Let’s briefly review these two shocking cases. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez posted pictures of REAL CHILDREN in his sham sting operation that drew “inappropriate” solicitations from “numerous” pedophiles seeking 13-year-olds.
So, did the state’s chief law enforcement officer vigorously pursue identifying, referring, and prosecuting these “numerous” real-life predators menacing children?
He does not mention even trying. Instead, in a dereliction of duty that would bring immediate impeachment in a state that actually cared about young people, Torrez filed a splashy, headline-grabbing civil suit against Meta and Instagram for “addicting” teens to sites where predators might lurk. The state court awarded his office $375 million. Political and interest groups led by ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders cheered lustily.
The Los Angeles “social media addiction” civil lawsuit last year against Meta was even more appalling. A mother with years of violent, psychological, body-shaming abuses and abandonments that destroyed her daughters miraculously resurfaced when the opportunity to grab some bucks suing social media arose. She deserved shaming and criminal prosecution, not a $6 million court award as if she were a “victim” along with utterly disgraceful accolades from politicians and interests, led of course by ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders.
Even the few social-media-blamers like Stein and Twenge who fleetingly respond to claims that parents’ and nearby adults’ skyrocketing drug/alcohol problems might possibly, just possibly affect kids’ mental health do so in order to concoct silly dismissals. There aren’t enough addicted parents to cause teens any significant problems, both shrug.
Are they joking? They nowhere even try to engage the CDC’s disturbing survey results showing 30% of teens report growing up with drug/alcohol-abusing parents, and these teens are 4 times more likely to report frequently poor mental health, 10 times more likely to attempt suicide, and 13 times more likely to self-harm than teens from non-abusive, non-addicted families.
We’re regressing to medieval brutality
The 2020s are tacitly (few authorities or advocates say this out loud) resurrecting the atavism that children and teenagers are not independent human beings deserving of rights and protection, but mere property at grownups’ (especially their parents’) disposal.
If kids are victimized by outside abusers, this atavism goes, their parents are the real victims. That’s why you see endless outrage again and again deploring the vanishingly few cases in which a child or teen death can be blamed on social media contacts.
However, when parents or other family or household adults abuse their kids and even murder them, the tragedies are ignored and/or quickly disappear from news squibs never to be mentioned again. Child and teen victims are unimportant unless they affect grownups’ property rights or powerful advocates agendas. Here’s a simple test:
· Readers no doubt have seen literally hundreds of media stories and high-level comments lamenting parents “concerned” over their teens’ social media use, as well as parents’ grieving over the small number of teens who committed suicide, suffered a drug overdose, or became Nazis or face-smashing groypers… etc.
· Now: how many media stories and/or politician/professional commentaries can you find of teens suffering the far, far more common, also devastating tragedy of their parents and nearby grownups committing suicide, overdosing, or indulging far-Right politics, religious fundamentalisms, and related lunacies?
If you find a case of the latter, please send me the link. I’ll gladly cite it. While both of these types of cases are tragedies whose survivors deserve sympathy and justice, we only care about the first type; the second is not just ignored but increasingly resented.
It’s worse than a double standard
The evidence for the “children-are-parents’-property” backlash goes beyond Haidt, Twenge, et al. Political leaders and teen mental health “experts” – the ones who profess loud anguish over the teenage “mental health crisis,” suicide, and drug abuse – register complete silence on the crucial parental/household abuses and adversities CDC analyses associate with two-thirds of teens’ mental health problems, five-sixths of teens’ opiate abuse, and nearly 90% of teens suicide attempts.
There are exceptions, sort of. In addition to the above 2024 CDC analysis, the Surgeon General’s largely ignored 2024 “Parents Under Pressure” advisory does cite grownups’ widespread mental health and abuse issues but nonetheless backs off from urgently citing them as causes in afflicted teens’ poor mental health.
On the other hand, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating state laws requiring priests and clergy to report to authorities child abuses revealed in confessions and consultations. Even after decades of tens of thousands of documented abuses and cover-ups by church personnel and leaders, authorities are degenerating into prioritizing abuse-excusing grownups’ “freedom of religion.” Political and professional leaders stand largely silent at severe cuts to child and family abuse investigations and programs.
As research piles up showing popular repressions like Australia’s under-16 social media ban and school cellphone bans are ineffective, do not promote teen mental health or other goals, and may be harmful especially to marginalized youth, advocates’ and legislators’ motives become clear: the well-being of teens was never their goal.
In fact, governments worldwide and Big Tech are gleefully exploiting the failures of the existing bans they pushed as excuses to push even more intrusive attacks on youths’ and, inevitably, adults’ online user privacy and rights. If it doesn’t work and harms younger generations today’s elders seem increasingly to dislike, do more of it.
“They are better than us.” Odgers says of Generation Z, citing a roster of social statistics that were improving dramatically long before current social-media controversies erupted “Given the suffering of the adults around them, they’re a resilient generation.” We could see Gen Z’s resilience as an incentive for positive, future-facing investment. Instead, that may be what we most resent.