Already, experts on media and kids are cautioning against alarmism, using this as a teachable moment. In Psychology Today, Sarah Rose Cavanagh points out that Twenge's evidence is “cherry-picked” and drawn from correlational research that does not show smartphones to be the cause of depression but instead shows “merely observed associations between certain variables.” And over at JSTOR Daily, Alexandra Samuel displays several charts that demonstrate how teen happiness has taken a slight dip but on the whole is not all that different than it was last decade or the decade before that.
And yet. As the mother of two teen girls, ages 13 and 15, so much of Twenge's article felt like a video replay of my household.
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