Sustainable Parenting

100. Phones & Mental Health: The Silent Crisis Affecting Your Kids

• Flora McCormick, LCPC, Parenting Coach

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Are smart phones making our kids sick?

Join me in my interview withJoanna Bertken, student assistance coordinator and school psychologist for the Bozeman School District, 

Johanna Bertken is a Nationally Credentialed School Psychologist and Student Assistance Coordinator for Bozeman Public Schools. She focuses on student mental health, bullying, violence, suicide, and substance use. Recently, she worked with the district’s Wellbeing Committee to assess local trends in depression and anxiety and develop strategies to support students. One key recommendation from the committee is a district-wide shift to entirely cell-phone-free schools from K-12.

Today, Joanna explains how smartphone use is directly linked to alarming increases in teen anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation since 2010.


In this episode, we mention the Wait Till 8th Campaign: https://www.waituntil8th.org/

Key Highlights from Today's Episode Include:

• Cell phones and social media target dopamine systems through intermittent reinforcement schedules similar to gambling addiction.


• Teenagers average 7 hours and 22 minutes daily on phones – equivalent to a full-time job.


• we are drastically underestimating the risks online, while overestimating the risks of free-play  


• Major depression has increased 145% among teen girls and 161% among boys since 2010.


• Algorithms deliver gender-specific harmful content: violence for boys, appearance-based content for girls.


• Wait Until 8th campaign helps parents connect with others delaying smartphone access.


• Many teens themselves want adults to establish boundaries they struggle to set themselves.


• Parents should consider alternatives like limited-function watches instead of smartphones.


• Replace "phones" with "cigarettes" in conversations to recognize how abnormal our permissiveness has become!


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Speaker 1:

So we're so lucky to have Joanna Birkin join us today. As the student assistance coordinator here in the Bozeman School District and as a school psychologist, she is leading efforts here in our community around cell phone use and being on the ground floor working with families and students. Joanna, what's at risk here?

Speaker 2:

Joanna. What's at risk here? Well, I think it's not too much to say that the cell phones are making our kids sick. We've seen increasing trends of exacerbated anxiety, depression, suicidal thinking, and I think that this is something, a new norm that we can either accept or we can make a different choice. And if we continue on saying we have no power over the way that the role that technology plays in our lives, then that's what will happen. We won't have a role. We're saying that that's what we're willing to accept and that is kids' lives.

Speaker 1:

Can't wait to unpack this more. Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Parenting Podcast. Let me tell you, friend, this place is different. We fill that gap between gentle parenting and harsh discipline that's really missing to parent with kindness and firmness at the same time and give you the exact steps to be able to parent in ways that are more realistic and effective and, for that reason, finally feel sustainable. Welcome. So I'm super passionate about this issue as a mom of a nine and 10 year old. We are luckily still in that space before having phones in the hands of our kids, and so prevention feels like so valuable and to think about how we can crowdsource. How can we start a movement that is more informed, not just more restrictive? I know you're on the same page with me. It's not about being more restrictive, it's being more informed about how to manage phone use and phone ownership in a way that is going to benefit our kids better and make sure that we're not just handing them a ticking time bomb.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I think right now we're in a really exciting period of time where we are seeing public opinion change on this issue really rapidly really came to my attention in around 2017 with the release of the book iGen by Jean M Twenge.

Speaker 2:

I'm definitely pronouncing that incorrectly, but that book came out in 2017 and it was sort of getting started this conversation around some of the challenges that the younger generations are facing, specifically with, you know, regulating phone use and the impact of phone use on social skills and mental health and overall well being.

Speaker 2:

That book and then that was really quickly followed up and I'm not sure the year of this one, but dopamine nation also focuses on the ways in which social media companies and different products online are targeting dopamine. They're trying to act upon our more addictive tendencies, our desire to get that feedback really readily and feel that immediate, instant gratification that we get from our phones. And then I also read the Anxious Generation as a recommendation from our district, so that book was read by our upper district administration, our superintendent was given out to our board members to read and this book is actually gaining some popularity in ways that those other books never did. It's just a really exciting time to be inspired about this issue and talking about it with parents, who are all really hoping to know you know what all this information means and how they can change their habits and expectations at home, and what schools can do to limit the impact of smartphones on student well-being.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Here we are, 2025, like the charts in the anxious generation are just, hearts in the anxious generation are just, frankly, off the charts. You know, they're just the material. The statistics are so clear that we cannot deny it and I think we have enough anecdotal information. Most people, whether it's their own child or a niece or a nephew or a cousin that we've watched, struggle with social media use and that addiction cycle that you were talking about, the dopamine that, like this, isn't all for good. It was maybe intended at first and we had beliefs that it connects us more, but now we also see the flip side.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, and it's really interesting, yeah, because the conversations that were happening in 2017 were more around like how do we utilize this amazing tool that we have at our disposal? And we were actually talking about how to integrate cell phones better into our school day and to how are we going to integrate cell phones into our assignments and teach kids how to use these amazing tools that we have. And the narrative has changed so much since then, largely because of this the availability of longitudinal data, which we didn't have available to us then, and this data shows. It's pretty hard to see this and not see the relationship between the data that we're seeing now and cell phone use. Specifically, jonathan Haidt, who is the author of the Anxious Generation, shows the dramatic increase in anxiety and rates of depression and suicide attempts among young people since 2010, which is around the same time as the iPhone's front-facing and when Instagram was gaining popularity. So I know we had social media before and we had cell phones before, but really this time when it came together, in that we have social media available to us any given time and the expectation is that we have to present ourselves in a certain way at any given time for an audience of people. It just is incredibly teenagers are already so vulnerable to that perception. You know, we know that they've been targeted by this and it's really impacting their mental health really significantly.

Speaker 2:

Some of those charts I had the same reaction to them that many people do, which is like it's pretty indisputable that at least there is a correlation between those changes in technology and increased rates of mental health challenges, and not just here in the United States but across the world.

Speaker 2:

So, percentage of US teens with major depression there's been a 145% increase among girls since 2010 and 161% increase among boys since 2010 in self-reported depression rates, and I will say that's a nationwide study. Our data here locally is very similar. It reflects those same sorts of changes here in our community as are being seen around the nation. Similarly, us teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm Since 2010, there's been a 188% increase among girls and 48% increase among boys. And I'd love to say, oh good, only a 40% increase among boys. But if you look at the suicide rate among young people aged 15 to 19, there's been a dramatic rise in suicide rates of young boys and it's always been something that we're aware of that boys, despite attempting suicide less frequently, will die by suicide more often than girls do because they use more lethal means. So it makes sense that we'd see an increase in non-fatal self-harm among boys and this really dramatic and extremely concerning rise in the suicide rate among boys.

Speaker 1:

It's so disheartening, you know, having a nine-year-old girl, an 11-year-old boy and knowing those numbers are true for the age that they're heading into, you know every parent kind of takes a sigh of like, just, you know frustration. And let's dive a little bit into like what's the connection? Because, like you said, it's correlational. It's hard to prove causation, but I know there's definitely some concrete thoughts about why this is correlated, one being the dopamine addiction like you talked about. It is just those. There's been many reports that show how much, how good technology companies have become at being able to prey on this dopamine addiction cycle, and that you know the fact that as soon as you're about to possibly turn off an app, it maybe gives you a new alert, those little pings they set you up to want to get notifications so that you're enjoying this little hit of like Ooh, someone wants to contact me, someone has a response to me, that and a desire to want to keep checking in as things are offered live and we don't want to miss out. I mean, it's just, it's all intentional.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and they've gotten so good at this. They've they've funded incredible research that has given them information on how best to keep people on the apps. They operated on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, which is the most powerful reinforcement schedule there is. It's like gambling. Who knows when I could pick up my phone and there'll be a like on my last post or there'll be a message from my friend. And even though those things are, you know dopamine. You know the addictive tendencies. Those exist in adults too, but we know, given brain development, young people are far more susceptible to the type of dysregulating activities that operate on our dopamine system that are present in these apps.

Speaker 2:

Autoscroll is a fairly new development. That's the function on Instagram and TikTok that requires very little action from you to keep scrolling through content, the fact that there's mildly interesting content, and then they'll throw something into the algorithm that really hits that dopamine. So maybe the next one is going to be the most interesting one. Maybe the next one is going to be the most interesting one. Also, dangerously, a lot of the things that keep people on especially young people on these apps is that the algorithm will default to things that are for boys, tend to be more violent content. There's a lot of clips of car accidents and people falling over and you know bicycle accidents and those escalate to some pretty violent, disturbing content For some students. Really quickly they can get access to those. For girls it tends to be more self-esteem based. There's been a real uptick in the markets for anti-aging creams.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and starting Botox in your twenties.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've been too. I'm too old for preventative Botox. Preventative Botox, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Oh, and the makeup tutorials and all these things. It's like this. It just like further intensifies the focus on how you look and how you appear to others. Mm, hmm.

Speaker 2:

Yep, and, and that kind of content is really addictive, in addition to damaging self-esteem and distorting a student's worldview. And so, while we don't have as much information pointing to the causality of phones impacting mental health, there have been some studies more recently that definitely suggest that's what's going on. So in 2019, there was a journal or an article in Pediatrics that demonstrated that teens using social media more frequently over a two-year period of time were more likely to develop depressive symptoms. And then there's another study that was in Nature Communications in 2022 that identified specific age windows, specifically from age 12 to 14 for girls, when social media is particularly harmful. They've also had some studies that show that limiting or removing access to social media improves mental health. They've also had some studies that show that limiting or removing access to social media improves mental health.

Speaker 2:

So this was an article that was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2018. And reducing social media use to 30 minutes a day led to lower anxiety, depression and loneliness. And then they've also another study that I'd just like to point to is that the more time students report spending on social media correlates with greater mental health symptoms. So this was in psychiatry in 2019., and it showed essentially that teens using their phones for five or more hours a day were twice as likely to report depressive symptoms compared to those using phones less than one hour a day. So these are all suggestive of a causal relationship between smartphone use and mental health issues.

Speaker 1:

So get this, joanna. Just by Googling it, I could see that the actual the average number of hours that a teen is typically on their phone is seven hours and 22 minutes per day.

Speaker 2:

It's more than a full. It's like a full-time job.

Speaker 1:

It's a full-time job and they're doing it like it's a full-time job, their commitment to it, their dedication, and so, yeah, if you have a full-time job of school and a full-time job on your phone, there's not space for a lot of other things, right? This is starting to affect friendships, dating, real life, social skills, the desire to, you know, be in relationship in real life, and what are? What are we seeing in terms of how that's affecting our teens?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it's really shocking to me, walking through the halls of our high schools here in town, the way that young people are communicating with one another. It looks a lot different now than what I remember, and you know what I remember wasn't always. You know the peak of social skills. Yeah, but a lot of what they do now is show each other what's on their phones. Yeah, of what they do now is show each other what's on their phones.

Speaker 2:

How they're communicating is. Look at this funny video I saw, or look at these photos I took, and you know, some of that might be healthy, but it is seeming like it replaces a lot of the more natural conversations that people have that aren't mediated by cell phones. So even when they're I mean they're communicating all the time via, you know, social media, but then when they're together they're not even able to be there with each other. They still have to have those conversations mediated by some sort of technology.

Speaker 1:

So what can be done? What do you recommend for those of us that are parents of the kids eight to 10? And what do you recommend of the parents of junior, high or high schoolers?

Speaker 2:

Well, I wish I knew the answer. I know that. You know parenting takes a balance, and you know being the title of your podcast is probably hinting at this sustainable parenting. There was a parenting crisis declared in 2024 by the Surgeon General about how hard it is and how bad it is for your health, so I hate to be another person being like oh, you're doing it wrong or you should do it this way. I don't have any major recommendations like that.

Speaker 2:

I will say, though, that in general, we way overestimate the dangers in regular life, in-person interactions.

Speaker 2:

For years and years, we've had concerns about stranger danger, and the idea of a kid out at night is a scary concept or doing independent things there are dangerous people in our neighborhoods, those sort of narratives and then so we we way overestimate that the danger is there, and we way underestimate the dangers online.

Speaker 2:

A lot of the things that even you know mental health issues and the addictive tendencies aside the predators have found out where the kids are, and they're not out on the streets, they're not playing in the parks, they're on the phones, and having easy access to them is. It's really scary, and we're still learning how, what kind of protections are needed and pushing companies to put in those protections. But I would encourage parents to try to flip that narrative. There are more dangers online than I think a lot of people know and there are a lot of benefits of being independent and having opportunities to play and socialize in the real world that a lot of people are, you know. Because of our fears and anxieties about the dangers, we've been maybe perhaps too restrictive and the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and of course those go together. Right, If you're like, well, you can't go outside, but I need to work from home or I need to cook dinner, then it's easy to think of just putting a child on an iPad or give them a phone earlier and so, or give them the phone to think that's the only way they can have more independence also. But we live in a space where there there are a lot of other alternatives. If we can seek watches or things like that, that's one thing we've opted for in our family is just a Fitbit watch that can call or text just the adults we have put on the phone, not even other friends that it is. There are some alternatives to still having them, so we're not so worried when they're away from us and I guess, yeah, just back to and then seeking ways that they can. They don't have to be inside the house on an iPad, Can they be outside and having a little more old school childhood play.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one of the recommendations from the anxious generation is not only more restrictions on cell phone use, but greater opportunities for risky play, which is something we're struggling with as a, as a school district. What does it look like to have unsupervised play at school? It's something that, you know, has been the opposite of what we've been trying to accomplish for many years, but the opportunity for kids to solve their own problems, for them to have conflict and get through it, for them to, you know, find out how much they can actually do on their own, is a really positive thing for childhood development. So we're just trying to find some balance. I think one of the major barriers that parents are up against is the social norm of providing kids with cell phones at an early age. Phones at an early age. If your child is the only one without a cell phone, it is very hard to have to have that ongoing battle every day of but mom.

Speaker 2:

I'm all my friends have it. I'm getting left out of my friends' social connections because I'm the only one who doesn't have a cell phone. So I think that the real solutions are, unfortunately, you know, those broader social and cultural changes and expectations that are both hard to accomplish but can allow an individual parent to make a different choice for their child, because right now it almost doesn't feel like a choice. I think for a lot of parents you know, as long as they have that argument of I'm the only one it feels like you know you're, by choosing something different, you're isolating your kid. So there's a there's a campaign called Wait Until Eighth that I would recommend that parents look into. It's you sign a pledge that says that your child will not have access to social media or a smartphone until eighth grade, and it allows you to enter your school that you attend and connect you to other parents that have signed the pledge. It also allows you to send out a message to other parents in your student's classroom saying hey, I've signed this pledge, would you like to? So it's really an effort to try to reestablish control over the social expectations of when a cell phone is appropriate, because that wasn't a decision that we ever made very thoughtfully. It's a decision that seems like we all fell into, and so it's giving us an opportunity to kind of get back ahead of it and say this is when is a time that we can feel more comfortable giving our child access to this.

Speaker 2:

And there is some research. I mean, eighth grade is not you know. All of a sudden they should have the whole thing. You know, I think I hear back from a lot of parents who say you know well, how are they going to regulate on a smartphone if they've never learned how? If I just give them a smartphone in eighth grade, aren't they going to have issues managing that responsibility? And the answer is absolutely yes. So again, even though you know we're waiting until eighth grade, you still need to kind of scaffold usage so that the child learns how to use it responsibly and manage their own time on it responsibly and manage their own time on it. And because they're in eighth grade and their brains are not fully developed, there still needs to be some parent oversight and restrictions on the way that they're using those devices.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I went to a local parent night where some local police officers were speaking on this topic and one of the things that the main police officer kept saying again and again and again was like, be a nosy parent Like you can't. It is not. Like you said, if we're looking at dangers, like there are so many possible dangers here, you would not just send your kid you know out with a gun and be like I guess you're gonna figure it out as you go. You would say you know, be really supervising and teaching and guiding, and I think the same is true certainly here of just it's okay to be nosy. This is not a privacy thing that they're just entitled to have.

Speaker 1:

You never look at having agreements about how you're able to look at what might be on their phone and what they're texting.

Speaker 1:

And obviously with the caveat that there's so many ways kids know how to get around their parents being able to see, you know, being on apps that are hidden under calculator, the calculator on the phone, and you know. So parents, beware, you may think that you know what's going on in the phone, but you also, your kids, they're, they're so clever they can just Google and they find out from their friends all these workarounds, ways to get around, even time blockers that you put on there. So it's a challenging kind of whack-a-mole. I've heard a lot of parents say as soon as you figure out one way to stop how they got around your boundary, there may be a new way they've found. So again, I think that just backs it up to like so why put this challenge in our hands before we absolutely have to? You know, I think if there's any other possible solution to the thing you want for your kid, let's try to pursue those routes, because it's just so challenging to monitor, to keep having boundaries with um with when it is in their hands.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and they keep pushing it, in large part because of you know the addictive nature of these apps.

Speaker 2:

And because they are not developmentally ready for this particular challenge. So when I talk to parent groups, a lot of what I hear back is, first of all, a lot of support for the ideas in the anxious generation and for solving this problem, but then also the question like well, why don't we then, knowing that these are, you know it's hard to self-regulate around these devices why don't we spend more time investing in teaching kids how to self-regulate? And I'm all for that. I think that could happen in tandem with more restrictions and more supervision. But it does seem to me like saying you know, okay, that plate of cocaine in front of your child like they should learn more self-regulation around the cocaine and you're like well, they're not.

Speaker 1:

their brains are not capable of of you know right Once you've sniffed it, like your, your chemistry is driving you. It's not always a conscious choice to still keep going back to the thing. Completely, joanna, I can't. I couldn't agree more. I think it's it's expecting too much of them too soon. And so I can tell you in my therapy work with with families that I'll hear that too, like don't, we need to start soon Because this is going to be a part of their lives.

Speaker 1:

They need to know how to manage it and it's like, yes, but they're going to need to learn how to manage a lot of really adult things in their lives, like sex and drugs and alcohol. And that doesn't mean you start it early so that they can get there. You wait until their brains are more developmentally able to have the brain function to even potentially take in self-control. You know the whole back to prefrontal lobe isn't fully developed till your late 20s or early 30s. So if we're looking for them to have better self control with a highly addictive substance really what it is in our phones that's not really fair to them.

Speaker 2:

Because of that brain development and lack of a fully developed prefrontal cortex, they're predisposed to risk.

Speaker 2:

And what does risk look like in the real world versus what does risk look like on a phone, on a social media website?

Speaker 2:

What risk looks like on social media is talking to dangerous people, it's sending naked pictures, it's asking for illicit substances. Risk online is because you don't know who else is, who you're talking to and what their motivations are. It carries a lot more risk than I think a lot of people believe and kids are not. They're not faced with that all the time in the real world without adult support and I feel like a lot of the things that happen online because of the privacy around it, people like the kids, when something happens, they seem very hesitant to reach out to adults for support with stuff that's happening online. Online that's, I mean, certainly something that we can work on in tandem, but again, because they're not necessarily developmentally ready for the responsibilities of these phones and the types of conversations they're having about sex and drugs, and those things are not happening with kids their same age, which would be if they were, you know, having them with their peers that were less able to support than we would be in a typical situation.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so besides the directive of getting involved in a wait till eighth campaign, which I know people can do anywhere nationally, any other points of action you want to direct listeners to?

Speaker 2:

So my advice to those folks that have older kids is you know, yes, we can. You know, treat this with some. You know we're going to try to rationalize with them. Here's why we're doing what we're doing what we're doing, and I would even use some of the information and data from the anxious generation to guide those conversations I shared with you. We had some high school students with us on the well-being committee. We had four students from two from each high school that both genders represented some different age groups. It was unanimous among that group that they wanted relief from the phones.

Speaker 1:

They feel the addiction and the negative sides of it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think that they can tell that it's anxiety producing. They can tell that it's not good for their social interactions. But because this has been in the same way that we've interpreted it, this is a social norm. We don't really have a choice. They feel the same way. My social life is on my phone, so they're asking us for help.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to quote one of the students, and I'm going to quote her poorly, but at the board meeting she shared with the board members there's a difference between peacekeepers and peacemakers, and we need you to be peacemakers, so because we can't do it on our own, and so we need you to make the rules to help us.

Speaker 2:

And so I think that, while that's a hard ask, and sometimes you need to go slow to go faster, however that quote goes, they want our help and that's our responsibility right now. As for younger kids just going back to what you were saying about, like you know, we've come to depend on them for convenience. We have examples of cell phone-free schools. Most of our elementary schools are cell phone-free. Very few kids have those and we still get the kids the cleats when they need them. You're still able to access your kid if you need to, we can replicate those same models in high school and in middle school and you know whatever. To work with your schools, because I again think that the building trust part is so essential in this to be partners with parents and help this become the new norm.

Speaker 1:

Yes, well, thank you so much. I am just so grateful for your efforts for our kids to have the peacemakers, like you're saying, be able to say we are going to do that parental role to give you that safer environment so you can thrive. And certainly that falls in line with everything I'm about here. You know, sustainable parenting is about kindness and firmness at the same time, and kids are wanting those safe, protective, loving boundaries from us, and this is one more place that it's important to do so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think anytime you're talking about phones. If you just replace phones with the word cigarettes or some other sort of addictive substance, a lot of the way we talk about them suddenly seems very strange. They really like it. They really like it. They really need it. All their friends are doing it. Yeah right, so it's time we take away the cigarettes.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I could not agree more. Thank you for that. We need that dose of reality. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for your time, Joanne. I really, really am so grateful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me and for getting this message out.