A leading psychologist on Adolescence, smartphones + everything teenage

The kids are doing better than you think

Dr. Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist in the Dept of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where she leads research into adolescent mental health and social development. She is the author of two nonfiction books, most recently Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us, and is a regular contributor to the conversation on youth mental health.

Over the last nine months, I have had three long conversations with Lucy—most notably in December, when I interviewed her in London for Intelligence Squared. What you will read below is a combined and condensed transcript of those conversations. To ensure accuracy, the conversation has also been reviewed by Lucy. (It is very long, because I wanted it to be as helpful as possible, so I suggest settling down with a cup of tea and a biscuit—or ten.) Most recently, Lucy and I spoke about the British drama, Adolescence, which was no.1 on Netflix in 71 countries.

At a time when the headlines about teenagers have never been shoutier, Lucy’s calm and considered work gives me hope. Teenagers are not—and have never been—without their fair share of challenges. But neither are they irredeemably fated, says Lucy. Whether or not you have a teenager, I hope you might find the below thought-provoking and/or clarifying. Lucy has kindly agreed to ‘be’ in the Comment section, so if you have a question for her, drop it below, and she’ll answer when time allows.

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Lucy, I love the overarching theme of your work, which is that the lives of teenagers are not silly or trivial. Can you start by talking a little bit about that?

My view is that just because teenagers are younger than us and doing things for the first time, doesn’t mean that they should be taken any less seriously. An example I really like is teenage romance. These relationships often get dismissed. People assume that because you're at that age, that it isn't love, or it's less real. But relationships at this age can be so powerful! You're not as good at regulating your emotions, so you feel things much more deeply. It's the first time these things have happened, so you don't bring any pre-existing life experience to it. After I published that piece, someone wrote to me saying that in your first relationship, “you love with your whole self”. After that, you always keep a bit of yourself back.

I think the love example is a nice example of how not to make assumptions about your teenager’s lives; to be curious about what their life is like in their world, and to take it seriously, even if it seems like a silly thing to be worrying about. I think listening and validating their experience—what they're feeling and how they're reacting to it—goes a long way.

Doing something for the first time lays down memories for life. You connect this to the “reminiscence bump”, which is a fascinating theory.

The reminiscence bump is pretty cool and the research is robust. When you ask adults to write down their 10 most important memories, or their 10 clearest memories, or the 10 memories that most define who they are, no matter how old the adult is writing them down—whether they’re in their 30s or their 90s—there's a bump in memories from the teens and 20s. It’s this incredibly salient, self-defining time; this period of firsts. When you do things for the first time, it has a bigger imprint on your identity and how you understand yourself.

You also talk about how teenagers are chronically sleep deprived ( because there's a big shift in their circadian rhythm due to hormones and puberty. If it's such a big public health issue, why do secondary schools not start later?

There’s an interesting story here. Russell Foster [a brilliant sleep scientist who I interviewed a few years ago for Doing It Right] and some other scientists at Oxford got a multi-million pound grant to do a trial with lots of schools. Half the schools would just keep doing what they're doing and the other half would delay their school day by an hour. But they couldn't recruit any schools who'd be willing to take part. The school’s reasoning was, if this experiment doesn't work, that's that year’s GCSEs on the line. The parents’ reasoning was, this is the difference between me seeing my teenager leave for school when I go to work, versus me leaving them asleep and expecting them to get up and go in, on time.

So the researchers had to change the study, where they just taught young people about sleep instead. And it's a shame because—especially in the States, where the school day often starts at 8am—for teenagers, getting up at 7am can feel like getting up in the middle of the night. They're often exhausted. I remember when I was at school, one boy in my English class would fall asleep every day and he would get told off. And looking back on it, I think he was just exhausted.

I particularly enjoy your findings on the paradox of popularity—that teenagers perceived to be popular, are often not very well liked. This is literal Mean Girls research.

It was so satisfying when I realised there was research on this! So, the word ‘popular’ means two different things. It can mean that people really like you, or it can mean that you have social status: you're visible; people know who you are; they know what you're doing. But those two groups of students can be quite distinct. And the latter is often actively disliked. There’s that really interesting trope—which is often true—that the people who peak in high school don’t tend to be popular as adults. And it's because the things that make you ‘Mean Girls popular’ in school, normally work against you in the adult world. For example, that you're a high risk-taker, or you're aggressive; that doesn't wash so well in the workplace.

Body image for teenagers has always been fraught. But now, a teenager's image is refracted and reflected, mediated by a screen. What’s the impact?

Eating disorders have increased. Symptoms of eating disorders have increased. There isn’t a definitive answer as to why, but it's possible that it's the increase in use of social media. I think it's interesting because while it’s worse now, it's also better, because we have a much better representation of different bodies now and much more celebration of body positivity.

I’ve really noticed that: my teenage niece is so aware of nutrition and health in a way I really wasn’t. She wants to nourish her body, and feel strong and capable. She cooked me something delicious the other day that she had learned to cook via some TikTok Adonis.

Yeah there’s lots of interesting and useful information for teenagers on healthcare, skincare, nutrition, that I don’t think teenagers growing up 20 years ago had at all. But obviously, it also has the potential to be problematic. I think it's very plausible that young people who are already self-conscious, and not happy about their body, could become obsessive about it in a problematic way, if they don’t find the right group of peers.

It's the volume. Good bad or otherwise, it’s the sheer visual volume. As millennial teens, we could both find pictures in magazines or online, but not 1,000 images in 5 minutes.

Totally. And it's an interesting thing about social media relative to real life social interactions; the volume of social interactions and the people that you get exposed to, is totally different to what would happen organically in real life.

You write in your book that teenagers take more risks “due to perceived invulnerability, sensation seeking and peer influence”. But not, generally, due to peer pressure. In fact, you write, peer pressure is something of a myth. That’s a mic drop moment, right there!

The more I dug into the research around peer pressure, the more I realised that there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding. The cliché that we are familiar with is that there's a group of people pushing an unwilling person into smoking, or drinking, or taking drugs. But the research suggests it's rarely like that. Certainly, peers influence each other all the time in adolescence, as they do in adulthood. But this idea that someone is being coerced unwillingly is generally not what is happening. If peers influence each other, the influenced usually wants to be influenced.

Why do you think the narrative of peer pressure has endured?

I think from a parental perspective, it's quite comforting. To imagine that they were persuaded, rather than their teenager being a willing participant. Sometimes, it’s bullying rather than peer pressure. The most common time for bullying is in the early years of secondary school. And it tends to have calmed down a lot by sixth form. I think there's something about that sort of jostling for social position, general immaturity, not knowing who your real friends are, that's particularly problematic, and it means young people easily conform to the crowd, so they don’t get bullied. I think that’s something to watch out for, more than peer pressure.

Which brings me neatly to the show that I know we both binged this weekend: Adolescence. I imagine most people reading this have either watched it, or are familiar with the story beats—but for those who aren’t, it’s about a 13-year-old boy who stabs a 13-year-old girl to death.

It’s now a whodunnit, it’s a whydunnit. I thought it was astonishing—gripping, fascinating, devastating—and I was thrilled to see it on Netflix, when usually it would have to prove itself on the BBC before being picked up by the streamer. It’s sparked the most extraordinary national conversation. As a professional working in this field—an academic version of Erin Doherty if you will—what were your thoughts?

I thought it was a great portrayal of so many aspects of adolescence and why secondary school is so hard: the social drama, the dynamics. All the subsequent conversation about the programme has been about misogyny, which is vital, but the show addresses other more mundane and common themes of adolescence: like how hard it is to be unpopular; what it’s like to be bullied. Obviously, it goes without saying, that none of that justifies this appalling crime. But the show explores this incredibly common experience of how you can become labelled as something—‘incel’, in Jamie’s case, ‘slut’, in Katie’s—and how quickly those labels spread, so that you become an outcast. This affects you at the time, obviously, but as it happens during a hugely important period of identity development, it can also shape how you feel about yourself forever.

A recent internal Home Office report advised parliament to treat pick-up-artists (PUAs) as extremists. (It was rejected by Yvette Cooper in January.) And watching Jamie try and figure out if the psychologist thinks he is attractive—as if he can sort of game her, or trick her, or manipulate her— you can see so clearly the through-line between, say, The Game, and the violence in the most extreme corners of the manosphere. I hope this makes parliament revisit that report.

There’s a book by Laura Bates called Men Who Hate Women, which argues that [pick up artistry] and other misogynistic communities are a form of terrorism that needs to be acknowledged as such. Something I’ve been trying to look up is how many teenage boys actually think this extreme misogyny manosphere stuff is admirable, and that Andrew Tate is someone to aspire to. I think—I hope—that a lot of teenage boys watching this would be either horrified by those views or just disinterested in them. I want to find out how many boys come back for more, who engage in the video, who like it. It needs a lot more research, both with big representative samples to understand what proportion of teenage boys endorse these views and also proper qualitative research where we look at detailed smaller groups.

How would you research that?

You can look at teenage participants’ TikTok data. I’m contributing to a study right now, led by Dr Nick Ballou at Oxford, where we’re analysing young people’s actual TikTok data to see what mental health content they’re watching. You can identify what they are engaging with, and how it relates to different self-reported aspects of themselves and their life. (They agree to this—you also tell them it’s all confidential and that you aren’t going to share their data with their teachers or parents.) That’s looking at mental health content, but you could do something similar with misogynistic content.

We mustn’t assume that all teenage boys are feckless or violent misogynists. I view Adolescence as an extreme cautionary tale. I suspect Jamie had what we would call ‘psychopathic traits’ in an adult, but because he is pre-18, we call them ‘callous unemotional traits’. This means lacking empathy, lacking guilt, a willingness to charm and manipulate other people for your own ends, paired with violent behaviour. Because Jamie killed a girl, the main takeaway of the show is misogyny. I wonder what would have been the takeaway if he killed a boy.

When I asked readers and friends what they wanted me to ask you, the most common topic was nature versus nurture. One of my best friends has been locked in a debate with her husband ever since they watched the show: she thinks ‘nurture’; he thinks ‘nature’. What do you think?

It’s always a bit of both. There’s a genetic component to it, and there is a socialisation component to it. So the parents who give you the genes are also the parents dictating the environment you grow up in, and research shows that both are relevant. As well as having the genes for being violent [Jamie’s mother mentions his father’s temper], we can at least assume that Jamie would have seen his dad expressing his anger and aggressive tendencies. And then combined with his experiences at school and online, all of that will have shaped him. I liked that the show didn’t answer the question. They leave us to wonder—as we do in real life. The ambiguity is partly why this programme has generated so much discussion.

I admired how the show played with the idea that boys who commit these crimes are the ones failing at school, who come from neglectful homes. Jamie came from a stable home, with his own bedroom, two loving parents who were married, he was very bright and did well at school. It refuses to conform to stereotypes and reminds us not to lean on cliché.

The author Mark Haddon wrote something on Instagram—referring to the work of John Amaechi—that I thought was really interesting:

“In all the discussion about young men and the internet and toxic masculinity it’s worth bearing in mind the racial double-standard @johnamaechiobe and others have pointed out. All too often white boys who commit violent acts are seen as victims of a toxic wider culture whereas black and brown boys are seen to be acting out something innate or being ‘typical’ of certain young people in their communities.”

That’s very astute— we definitely see that in the media reporting of youth crimes. There has been reams and reams written about Adolescence in the last few weeks. (I thought this one in Slate was particularly thoughtful.) I wondered what you thought about Caitlin Moran’s take: that this is a show about absent dads, not teenagers in crisis.

I think all these articles need to be taken with a slight pinch of salt. Articles have angles and everyone wants to have an original take. Yes, there will be some families that it would be beneficial for the father to be there more, but I’m always hesitant of making sweeping statements about a) all teenage boys are all in crisis and b) even if they were, I don’t think we can ascribe it to anything as straight-forward as, their dads aren’t there, or they’re working too much. Lots of present dads are abusive and problematic. If it’s a problematic relationship, teenagers are far better off living with one parent, than being in an unhappy home with two parents.

One of the most jaw-dropping parts of the show is when DI Bascombe’s son translates the emojis in the comment section of Jamie’s Instagram, which shows that the police had interpreted Jamie and Katie’s ‘relationship’ wrongly. Should we all be learning more about the dark side of emojis?

There’s a general point here about encouraging conversation between teenagers and adults about what’s happening on phones and the internet. Be interested and non-judgemental about what they are doing online; educate yourself. But it’s always been the case that parents and adults don’t understand some part of teenage communication. It’s intentional, to an extent. Emojis are particularly tricky because there’s such nuance. The thumbs up is really offensive to a teenager, for example. And when they are laughing, they don’t use the crying with laughter emoji, they use the skull.

Because you’re dying with laughter. Or just dead.

Exactly. There are elements of language that are generational and that’s okay. But if it’s part of a misogynistic cult, then it’s useful for adults to know what signs to look out for. I should think lots of parents will be having these kind of conversations with their kids right now.

MPs like Annelise Midgley have said that the show should be shown in schools. That seems really sensible to me—as part of a digital literacy or social health class.

It’s good material to stimulate discussions and to spark conversation about all sorts of things. Lots of schools are already having discussions around toxic masculinity and smartphones, so will likely just add this in.

As readers will be able to tell, you are very much committed to nuance over concrete conclusions. Which brings us to Jonathan Haidt, whose work (like many psychologists working in the field of adolescence, I should say) you have been critical of. For those unfamiliar, The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has 4 key tenets:

• That we are underprotecting teens online and overprotecting teens offline

• That smartphones should be banned until the age of 14

• That social media should be banned until the age of 16

• That kids should have more free outside play

The first and last are uncontroversial. (Although key to note the vast reduction in youth spaces now, with closures of libraries, village halls, sports centres, music venues etc.) The middle two, however, have proved ripe for debate. Why do you think that Haidt's work—which is phenomenally popular both sides of the Atlantic—is not telling the full story?

It's really difficult to figure out exactly what impact social media and smartphones are having on adolescent mental health. From the perspective of academic debate, it’s really interesting—but academic debate is not helpful for parents who are stuck in the middle, trying to figure it out. What bothers me is that Haidt might have unnecessarily worried parents. There is a fear—a gut instinct that bad things happen on phones—that Jonathan Haidt has harnessed. There is some evidence to support him and and so he has written an extremely popular book, which tells a very neat story about how this is causing this massive wave of mental health problems and this huge soar in suicide, and it’s simply not true.

Haidt hasn't accurately represented the research and there's been a massive pushback among psychologists who want to make the point that while it’s incredibly messy, it’s not as bad as he says it is.

[Lucy later sends me a link to video debate between developmental and quantitative psychologist, Candice Odgers and social psychologist, Haidt which I very much recommend watching. In response to Haidt’s claim that teenagers have never been more in crisis, Odgers notes that while the adult mental health crisis is peaking, the youth mental health crisis has actually gone down in the last 2 years. She also says that 99.5% of youth mental health outcomes have nothing to do with smartphones—“the most compelling evidence is that kids who struggle with their mental health, spend more time online later”. You can also read Odgers in The Atlantic on what she sees as the panic around smartphones.]

My belief is that smartphones are bad for some young people, but a lot of the time they don't cause a problem and can be both helpful and positive. When I get a moment I’d like to make a resource pack for parents to gather together all the evidence and articles that show that Haidt is not right.

What about a smartphone ban for schools? You put them in little pockets, which sounds relatively straightforward. [Some schools such as Eton—notably, a closed environment—have banned them entirely.]

I think it’s potentially realistic to limit access to phones in schools, and it’s a more achievable goal than banning them totally, but it’s logistically tricky. In a large school, you would have up to 1,500 young people whose phone needs to be taken off them and then given back to them at the end of the day.

Can't they all put it in a pocket, like a wall of pockets?

You can buy a pouch that gets locked with a tool, so pupils keep their phone but they can’t access it. But what schools found is that young people quickly found out how to buy those unlockers on the black market. Or they’d pay people to unlock them for them, so the kids with money would be able to do this easily, the others not so much. Or schools can put them in special lockers, but the other thing I’ve heard from teachers is teenagers have two phones and hand in their fake one. And the thing about having a secret phone is that when something goes wrong, they won’t tell you.

What about age?

There's nothing to support specific ages about when it kind of magically becomes easy. I’d love to give everyone a message as clear as Jonathan Haidt, but unfortunately it’s messy and difficult. Broadly speaking, obviously at some point it's too young, and at some point it becomes more reasonable, and there has to be a transition point where you can gradually introduce your child to having a phone. Maybe somewhere between 11 and 16, you can give your child a phone, but with lots of rules and boundaries (like using parent controls, or using it supervised, or using it only in family spaces). And then gradually in a way that makes sense for you and your child and their circumstances, and maybe over several years, they are gradually given more independence with the device. But I don’t know if it makes sense for any step to be government-mandated at a specific age.

I really recommend Tech Without Stress. It’s a resource created by Dr Jacqueline Nesi and Dr Emily Weinstein, two psychologists and academics in the States, who are approachable and well informed and realistic. I think efforts should be spent on disseminating accurate information about it to parents and helping them feel supported and empowered about an issue which is inevitably going to continue. Nesi also has a great newsletter with really thoughtful articles: I recommend the one about teen-friendly ‘dumb phones’ and another examining some of Haidt’s arguments. There’s just so much fear and guilt right now for parents, and I think researchers like Nesi and Weinstein are a great antidote.

What's obviously happening a lot now—my kids’ primary school does it—is you all sign a pact for your children not to have a phone before a certain age, which I was happy to do.

I think there's something genuinely useful about parents being in it together, because you don't want to be in a position where your teenager is the only one who doesn't have a smartphone, because that has its own social consequences, making an outcast of a kid, etc. I’m sceptical about how well this approach would work in secondary school though, particularly beyond the first year or two.

Haidt says that there is no other way to explain the sharp uptick in poor mental health in 2012, other than that being when smartphones went mass. You rebut this. Can you talk a little bit about correlation vs. causation and why you believe that teenage anxiety is multifactorial?

The sharp uptick that Haidt portrays isn't as neat as his percentage would be, particularly if you look across different countries. [In their discussion, Odgers tells Haidt that his approach of ‘teasing out’ individual studies from longitudinal studies is unscientific.] His statistic about suicide in teenage girls, for example, is an American statistic. In lots of other Western countries, where smartphones and social media are common, there has been no teenage suicide increase that corresponds to the introduction of this technology. So it's not necessarily the case that you see this spike at this exact moment when smartphones are launched. To be clear, I am not saying that social media is irrelevant. But the only thing we can say, with evidence, is that social media is doing something—and that there are lots and lots of other factors contributing to mental health, that are being mostly ignored right now.

Such as?

There’s been an increase in academic pressure (kids feel much more pressure now in school to perform than previous generations did and more teenagers are going to university) which we know from lots of research is associated with worse mental health. Economic factors—like an increase in poverty after austerity measures were introduced in 2012—has also had an impact. There’s been an increase in obesity, which can be correlated with the increase in mental health problems. And COVID clearly didn’t help. There are also various things in the States, where a lot of Haidt’s data comes from, that we don’t have here. The opioid crisis for example. If your parent is addicted to opioids, or dies due to an overdose, that’s going to affect your mental health.

The other important thing to talk about as a potential explainer of increasing mental health problems is the fact that we're talking about it more and we have much better awareness about mental health, which means teenagers might answer the survey questions differently now, or seek help more readily. Teenagers have the means to express themselves now about how they feel; for a long time, they didn’t have this.

Teenagers are also famously mercurial. Fabulous one day, terrible the next, it just goes with the territory.

Which is relevant, because most of these studies rely on self-report data. Self-report data is vital, but it is tricky, because it’s essentially impossible to figure out from generation to generation whether teenagers are answering the questions in the same way. For example, one of the items that gets used a lot to measure mental health problems is, ‘I worry a lot’. And you answer that with a ‘no’, ‘somewhat true’ or ‘true’. Now, we don't know if a teenager reading that today has the same understanding of what ‘worry’ is—or has the same understanding of what ‘a lot’ means—as a teenager 20 years ago. So you could see the shift in the numbers in the data, but we don't know definitively if that means today's teenagers are actually worrying more.

A few years ago, you wrote a piece where you said that while the increase in psychiatric language and the public conversation around mental health is obviously a positive step, in some ways it might have also done a disservice to teens. How so?

Teenagers are being bombarded with the possibility that they're experiencing mental health problems. It comes from a very good place—but I think it's really difficult if you're a teenager experiencing typical ups and downs. You’ve going through the massive emotional challenges of being an adolescent and then the language that you're being handed from every direction is that it's a mental health problem.

I've been thinking about the best way to educate young people about mental health for the last five years and I think it's going to take my whole career to figure out the answer. Most people would agree we don't want to go back to the time where we don't talk about it. But mental health language involves such vague terms and there's such a blurry boundary between what is a normal emotion, what is a problematic emotion and what is a mental disorder. I think we’re now seeing a kind of backlash to this willingness to talk about mental health more, which isn’t great either.

Some of which is a response to the self-diagnosing via TikTok.

Exactly. A colleague and I recently finished a study where we interviewed mental health clinicians about their experience of self-diagnosis with teenagers and what happens when a teenager turns up to an appointment with a really clear idea of the disorder they think they have. One thing that was consistently said across clinicians was that teenagers don’t diagnose themselves with anxiety and depression, because it's like ‘everyone’ has those ones now; they don’t really ‘count’ anymore. So they're now coming in with what the clinicians called “the big ticket items”: self-diagnoses of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder.

As in, they’re desirable?

I spoke to a psychiatrist recently who saw a teenager who thought she had bipolar disorder, the mum also thought the teenager had bipolar disorder. The psychiatrist assessed her, and said she didn’t think she had bipolar disorder—and the young person kicked off and left the room. The psychiatrist was saying to me that should be a good thing—to be told that you don’t have a massively stressful mental disorder. But for that young person, by that point, this self-diagnosis had become a useful frame of understanding of what was happening to her—and to her, the psychiatrist was removing that and not replacing it with an alternative.

There are also plenty of people who suspect themselves of having a disorder and they are right. And because of this social media self-diagnosis, there is now a sense that self-diagnosis by default is inaccurate. So that’s not helpful either. Because with it comes this massive dismissal: that people are doing it for attention; or to be cool. I don't know what the end point is. I hope we will get to a time where we won't lean so readily on psychiatric terms to explain our experiences. Where language can regain some meaning. But at the same time, it’s crucial that when a young person self-diagnoses, we don’t dismiss that. They are in distress and they need to be taken seriously, even if we might not agree with the exact terminology they are using.

Do you think this puts teachers in a tricky position? They have 30 kids in a class to manage, how can they also be on top of everyone’s mental health?

A psychologist who works in a school told me this anecdote where a teenage girl wrote in her notebook, I don't want to be here anymore. And the form tutor saw it and she was worried and took it to the mental health lead for the girl’s year group. The mental health lead wasn’t sure what to do either and gradually it went up and up until it ended up with the psychologist. And the psychologist said, Has anyone actually asked the young person why she wrote that? And nobody had asked her. Everyone was so worried about getting it wrong.

I think there is now this fear that ‘mental health’ has to be outsourced to the professionals. Whereas actually teachers—and school staff in general—have this incredibly powerful role as trusted adults. They know the young person, they have more time with them than anyone else, they can truly be a useful social support. Their role should not be devalued. But at the same time, teachers do need professional support available for the complex cases; they can’t be expected to be clinicians.

Can we end on a hopeful note? Because what I loved about Coming of Age is that it felt pretty hopeful. For teenagers and for parents.

We can! I wanted to include real-life stories in the book, so before Twitter died [by which Lucy means, the pre-Musk days] I put out a call for people to tell me a story about their teenage years. I got so many lovely and fascinating and incredibly moving stories. With some of them I was crying by the end, because I just thought, I cannot believe you've gone through that, but also, you've described it so beautifully. The one I found most moving was a young woman who lost her mum when she was 15, and the way she described how her friends looked after her—it was this incredibly moving description of how impressive teenagers can be, how much they look after one another, and it gave her this sort of taken a life-affirming approach, despite what she had gone through. I am so moved every time I read it.